From Law Firm to HR Tech: How WorkShield Identified and Validated Their Market Opportunity

Sometimes the best market opportunities aren’t discovered through traditional research – they’re uncovered through firsthand experience with broken systems. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, WorkShield founder Jared Pope shares how his experience as an employment lawyer revealed a critical gap in workplace misconduct reporting.

The Breaking Point

As a successful employment lawyer, Jared was frustrated by a fundamental misalignment. “Hitting the clock every year at zero, and you got to start over and you do all of it for maybe a $20,000 bonus, but yet you’ve made the firm over $1.4 million. It just didn’t seem like it was a fair shake,” he explains.

But this frustration led to a deeper insight. Through his legal practice, he saw how workplace misconduct cases often resulted from broken reporting systems rather than malicious intent.

The Me Too Catalyst

The Me Too movement in late 2017 provided the spark. “It started really around November of 2017,” Jared recalls, “really diving into what is the existing system? Is it broken? Can it be fixed? And if it can be fixed, can it be scalable?”

These questions led to a systematic analysis of how companies handled workplace misconduct. The findings were troubling. Most internal reporting systems routed complaints back to the same departments where the issues originated, often taking over 30 days to resolve cases.

Understanding the Real Problem

A key insight came from Jared’s law school days, studying the “role of apology.” Research showed that 99% of plaintiffs who won multi-million dollar settlements weren’t primarily after money. As Jared notes, “All I really wanted was an apology, but they just weren’t willing to give it.”

This understanding shaped WorkShield’s approach. The problem wasn’t just slow resolution times – it was that existing systems failed to acknowledge the human need to be heard and validated.

Building the Solution

Rather than just creating another reporting tool, WorkShield developed a hybrid approach combining technology with human expertise. “We have a very hard line about any company that’s trying to solve workplace drama, toxicity, HR misconduct, through chatbots, through technology alone,” Jared emphasizes. “When these issues come up, voices want to be heard, and there’s got to be another human voice on the other side of that line.”

Early Validation

The COVID-19 pandemic provided unexpected validation of their model. While many assumed remote work would reduce incidents, WorkShield saw the opposite. “People got really bold in their actions,” Jared notes, explaining how virtual interactions emboldened bad behavior.

Their data has also revealed surprising patterns that challenge conventional wisdom. “Any department that has 100% male or 100% female has way more issues than when there’s departments that just have female and male together,” Jared shares, highlighting the value of their data-driven approach.

Scaling the Solution

Today, WorkShield protects over 160,000 employees across 300 companies, handling investigations 70-80% faster than the industry average. They’ve identified their ideal customer profile: “Our ICP is really designated between any company that has employees from on the low side 100 to 200 lives to on the high side about five to 6000 employee lives,” Jared explains.

The economics are compelling. Traditional internal investigations cost companies around $20,000 per incident when accounting for HR time, legal costs, and lost productivity. WorkShield’s solution dramatically reduces these costs while providing better outcomes.

Looking ahead, they’re expanding beyond misconduct reporting into ethics, fraud, and whistleblower protection. They’re so confident in their process that they plan to cover insurance deductibles for clients who face lawsuits – a bold move that demonstrates their understanding of both the problem and their solution’s effectiveness.

Their journey from law firm to HR tech offers a powerful lesson for founders: sometimes the best market opportunities come from experiencing problems firsthand rather than traditional market research. The key is recognizing when your frustration with a broken system might actually be pointing toward a bigger opportunity.