Who builds this.

Opexcell is run by Drew Patterson, out of Houston. Before the agency, Drew spent about seven months as a partner at a Social Security Disability firm, Brad Thomas Disability, not an employee, actually in the operation. The firm doubled its revenue while he was there. He rebuilt the whole back office.

Here is the honest part, because it matters. The automation did not cause that growth. What it did was carry the operational load, so the same team could handle roughly double the volume without drowning in it. That distinction is the entire pitch. We do not sell you a revenue number. We take the busywork off your people so the number you already have room to hit stops being capped by how fast you can hire.

Drew also publishes research on the system his clients work inside. His 2026 study, The Judge Lottery, analyzed 317,462 SSA hearing decisions and found that judges in the same hearing office allow claims at rates that commonly differ by more than 30 percentage points. The full dataset and code are public, so anyone can check the math.

Lawyer Magazine quoted him on the safeguards a firm needs before it lets AI near a live matter.

Most of it is custom code. Python, official APIs, and browser automation only in the spots where a system genuinely has no API to talk to. That is more work up front than dragging boxes around in a no-code tool, and it is the reason the systems survive portals, messy documents, and the edge cases that quietly break a Zapier flow.

We host and run the systems so the client’s team never has to manage servers or vendor accounts, and the custom work is the client’s property once paid for. Our deepest experience is with Clio, where we run five production integrations sharing one OAuth token chain.

A second engineer, Phil Cohen, builds alongside Drew. Phil spent twenty years in engineering at Amazon and CBS before Opexcell, so the work does not stall when one person is heads-down or out. And every system ships with a runbook, plain documentation of what it does, how it runs, and how to fix it.

If a client ever parted ways with us, they would leave with the code, their data in full, and the runbooks, and any competent developer could stand the systems back up from those. That is on purpose. The work is theirs; we just run it so they don’t have to.