AI for law firms
Law is the sector where the wrong AI project causes the most damage and the right one saves the most time. The difference is entirely in what the system is allowed to do on its own — which is why we design that first and everything else afterwards.
Confidentiality is an architecture decision
For most firms the first question is where the text goes. It is a fair question and it has a real answer: the pipeline can run entirely on hardware under your control, or inside your own cloud tenancy, with no client material leaving it. We run open models in production for exactly this reason, so this is a configuration choice rather than a research project.
Where a frontier model genuinely adds value, it is applied to material that has been de-identified, or only to non-privileged work such as your own marketing content. You will always know which model saw which category of data, in writing.
Four things that work
1. Enquiry triage
Website and phone enquiries classified by matter type, checked for basic conflicts, urgent items flagged, and out-of-scope enquiries answered courteously with a referral rather than being left in silence. Good firms lose real work to a slow first response, and this is the cheapest fix available.
2. Client intake
Gathering the facts, dates and documents a fee earner will need, in the client’s own language, before the first meeting — so that meeting starts from a prepared file instead of a blank page.
3. Document review support
Over a bundle: finding every mention of a date, party or clause type, marking inconsistencies, and producing a chronology. The output is a map for a lawyer to check, never a conclusion. Every assertion links back to the page it came from, because an unsourced summary is worse than no summary.
4. Multilingual client communication
Drafting correspondence in the client’s language with a locked glossary of terms of art, reviewed by a fee earner before it goes out. For firms with international clients this removes weeks of turnaround.
What we will not build. Anything that gives legal advice to a member of the public without a lawyer in the loop. Anything that files, signs or sends on a deadline unattended. Anything that summarises a case without citing where each statement came from. These are refusals, not options to be priced.
On hallucination
The published examples of lawyers citing invented authorities all share a cause: a general model was asked to recall a fact instead of being given the source and asked to work from it. Systems we build retrieve first and answer only from retrieved material, with a link on every claim. A model that cannot find support says it cannot find support — and that answer is designed in, then tested for.
Where to start
Enquiry triage. It touches no privileged material, the benefit is measurable within a month in time-to-first-response, and it gives the firm a low-risk way to see how the system behaves before any client file is involved.
Start where nothing privileged is involved.
Enquiry triage is measurable within a month and touches no client file. It is the sensible way for a firm to find out how we work.