When Leah Del Percio picked up the phone that day, she was doing what many trusts and estates lawyers know too well.
She was sitting on hold with a bank, trying to close an account for someone who had died.
Del Percio had just returned from maternity leave at a large Washington, D.C.-area law firm. Her paralegal was out sick, so the task landed on her desk. Hours into the call, her phone lit up.
Her infant son’s daycare was calling.
“They said he was exhibiting flu symptoms,” Del Percio said. “He was an infant and I needed to pick him up.”
She had already been on hold for four and a half hours.
“I’m like, gosh, I’ve been on hold for four and a half hours. I can’t drop the call now,” she said. “My paralegal will have to do it all over again tomorrow. And all of that is time that’s being billed to a client.”
She hung up anyway.
Standing in line at a pharmacy waiting for a Tamiflu prescription, Del Percio stopped thinking like a lawyer and started thinking like a founder.
“I just kept thinking, there’s gotta be a way to automate this,” she said. “Not only for lawyers, so they don’t have to deal with inefficiency, but just help with efficiencies in their practice.”
From one phone call to a company
Eighteen months later, in 2020, Del Percio left her firm and launched Trustate, a Tampa-based estate operations platform built for law firms.
The company raised its first venture capital round in late 2021 and has been scaling since.
Today, nearly 1,000 law firms across all 51 U.S. jurisdictions use Trustate. The platform also works with banks and trust companies, including several in the Tampa Bay area.
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“We’re infrastructure software for lawyers, in-house trust companies and law firms,” Del Percio said. “We work with all 51 U.S. jurisdictions. We have a lot of customers in Florida, as one can imagine, but we’re building a national brand.”
Automating the work after someone dies
Trustate focuses on a part of legal work most clients never see.
Closing accounts. Locating assets. Tracking liabilities. Coordinating with banks, advisors and heirs.
Before software, much of that work fell to paralegals and junior attorneys, making phone calls, waiting on hold and entering data manually.
Del Percio wanted to turn that chaos into a system.
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Trustate’s platform helps firms discover asset and liability data, draft estate documents, organize probate tasks into workflows, and calculate estate balances and tax figures in a shared dashboard.
“What I learned was lawyers really had no way to scale their practice if they were in trusts and estates,” she said. “They’re doing a lot of the work. They’re a big part of a wealth management team.”
Her goal was not just efficiency.
“I wanted to build something that helped them eliminate inefficiencies and allow them to better serve their clients at a much lower price point.”
Built for small firms at scale
Trustate’s early customers were trust and estates lawyers at small firms.
“The majority of trust and estates lawyers are in firms of under ten attorneys,” Del Percio said. “I see us as really empowering them.”
Del Percio spent her career in large law firms and understands how difficult it is for younger lawyers to gain experience.
“That can be a little soul-crushing for newly minted lawyers,” she said. “To practice and represent clients really well, you need to almost apprentice.”
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Trustate, she believes, can shorten that learning curve.
“Our platform arms newer lawyers and more junior lawyers with the ability to practice at a very high level without such an onerous infrastructure,” she said.
The business model supports that goal.
Instead of billing by the hour, Trustate operates on a subscription model. Solo practitioners may pay as little as $189 a month. Small firms pay around $400. Larger institutions negotiate contracts based on usage.
“It’s more of that gym membership model,” she said. “They use it throughout the year.”
That recurring revenue has allowed Trustate to invest heavily in product development. The company has tripled revenue over the past year and continues to ramp up research and development.
“It helps make revenue a lot less choppy,” Del Percio said. “You can invest more in R&D, and a lot of those initiatives are coming to fruition now.”
AI built for legal work, not hype
Trustate is leaning into artificial intelligence, but Del Percio is careful about how she describes it.
“There’s a lot of noise in the AI world right now,” she said. “A lot of startups are just creating a ChatGPT wrapper.”
Trustate’s approach is different.
The platform uses AI agents built on proprietary data and a knowledge graph rather than generating content from scratch.
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“Our system doesn’t hallucinate,” she said. “It’s using our robust content and the client’s underlying data.”
Trustate recently hired a Tampa Bay-based head of technology, an exited founder, to lead those efforts. A major product release is planned for mid-2026.
“We think it’s going to help us stay at the forefront of legal technology,” Del Percio said.
Growing from Tampa to a national niche
Trustate employs 14 people. About five work out of Tampa’s Embarc Collective. The rest are distributed across the country.
Half the team is engineers. The other half includes former paralegals and client service professionals.
Del Percio is also focused on building future legal talent.
As a Georgetown Law alum, she helped create a for-credit externship that places law students inside Trustate.
“I could train future lawyers and give them real-world experience,” she said. “That’s been really cool.”
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Inside the trust and estates bar, Trustate is already becoming familiar.
“For our trust and estates lawyers, we’ve become kind of a household name,” she said.
She hears it firsthand.
“I was on the phone with a lawyer yesterday about something unrelated and their paralegal walked in with a question about how to use our software,” she said. “Those small wins really matter.”
A woman-owned company built on trust
Trustate is a women-owned and women-run company. Del Percio co-founded it with Tara Faquir, a longtime friend she met at the University of Miami.
“We were college roommates,” she said. “We never thought we’d go into business together.”
That changed after Faquir helped settle a grandparent’s estate and recognized the same pain points.
“We both left our jobs and jumped in headfirst in 2020,” Del Percio said.
Some investors question companies founded by friends. Del Percio sees it differently.
“Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are,” she said. “I can’t think of a better person to go into business with.”
Looking ahead, Del Percio sees Trustate expanding into adjacent practice areas including family law, real estate, corporate work and litigation, as well as deeper into banking and wealth management.
“The way lawyers practice is changing,” she said. “And we’re leading that charge.”
