The work is billable hours against a calendar. AI that saves a partner three hours a week and a paralegal ten is not a rounding error. It is margin. Here is how we scope it for firms of 5 to 80 people.
It is 4:40 on a Thursday. A partner has spent the morning on a deposition. Her inbox has 214 unread messages, 11 flagged urgent. Her paralegal is on a call with opposing counsel. An intake form came in at 2:11 p.m. that has not been triaged.
Two conflict checks are waiting. One is from a referral that came in over the weekend and is already cooling. The firm's matter management system, which they pay $9,600 a year for, has a well-built intake module. Nobody has had the time to configure it.
This is where AI lives or dies for small firms. Not in the courtroom. In the 4:40 p.m. inbox.
The problem is rarely the tool. The problem is that nobody has had 90 minutes and the right operator to set it up.
Most small firms already pay for 80% of the software they need. Clio, Smokeball, MyCase, PracticePanther, Karbon, Canopy, Ignition. These are mature products with intake flows, automation, and integrations that would cut admin time meaningfully. The adoption gap is not a product problem. It is a time problem.
The billable hour trap is that the only person with authority to reconfigure the workflow is also the person with the highest opportunity cost of reconfiguring it. A partner who bills at $450 an hour will not spend a Saturday mapping triggers in Clio.
The second trap is the pilot trap. A managing partner subscribes to a new AI tool, runs a pilot for three months, sees modest results, and cancels. The failure is almost always in the glue. The tool does not talk to the calendar. The intake bot does not fill the matter. The doc assembler outputs PDFs the filing system cannot read. AI inside a firm is 10% model and 90% plumbing.
These are not hypotheticals. These are the five scopes we quote most often for firms in this industry. Every one is a fixed-price sprint, typically between 4 and 10 weeks.
An intake flow that captures the prospect, runs a conflict check against your matter database, categorizes the request, drafts a first response in your voice, and schedules a paid consult when appropriate. Your intake coordinator reviews and sends, instead of writing from scratch.
Vendor-neutral. No reseller margins.
A document assembly layer over your existing templates (NDAs, engagement letters, demand letters, routine motions). It pulls structured data from the matter, fills the template, flags anything that needs a human judgment call, and leaves a clean first draft for review.
Vendor-neutral. No reseller margins.
A passive time-capture layer that watches calendar, email, and document activity, drafts narrative entries tagged to matters, and lets the timekeeper confirm or edit at end of day. Hooks into your existing billing system. Kills the 6:30 p.m. Friday reconstruction.
Vendor-neutral. No reseller margins.
A client-facing response layer trained on your firm's prior correspondence and practice-area knowledge. Routine questions get a drafted reply for the assigned timekeeper to review. Non-routine questions get escalated with matter context pre-attached. Response SLAs improve without adding headcount.
Vendor-neutral. No reseller margins.
A post-matter workflow that asks for reviews at the right moment, drafts a LinkedIn post for the timekeeper to approve, and maintains a referral-source dashboard. Most firms have a referral problem. It is usually an operations problem, not a marketing problem.
Vendor-neutral. No reseller margins.
“Large firms are paralyzed by conflicts, compliance review cycles, and partner-committee approvals. You have none of that.”
An AmLaw 200 firm has 1,400 attorneys, a general counsel, a compliance committee, a technology committee, and a 14-month procurement cycle. Their AI strategy is a 30-page deck that gets debated for a year before a pilot runs.
Your firm does not have any of that. You can decide to try a new intake flow on Monday and ship it by the following Friday. That speed advantage compounds. A firm that runs three AI-assisted workflows by year-end is not 3% more productive. It is structurally different.
Second, the data is tractable. AmLaw firms have thirty years of matter data in six different systems. Yours fits in one. The cost to get AI working well on a small corpus is a fraction of what it is at scale. You are not fighting yesterday's decisions.
Bring your current stack (Clio, Karbon, Outlook, whatever it is) and the two workflows you'd most want to compress. We'll give you a rough ROI range and a straight answer: audit now, wait a quarter, or skip us.
Every firm has operational problems AI is genuinely wrong for. Being honest about these is the first sign your advisor is worth paying.
If matter-critical information lives in a partner's Gmail rather than your matter system, AI is the wrong first move. The work is data hygiene. Do that quarter, then talk to us.
Document assembly depends on reasonably consistent source templates. If every attorney drafts engagement letters from memory, the first sprint is codifying templates, not buying AI.
Client confidentiality and unauthorized-practice concerns are not AI objections. They are obligations. We won't deploy anything that puts your bar status at risk, and we won't pretend the risk is zero.
A Readiness Audit runs two to four weeks. We sit with the managing partner, the operations lead, and your highest-volume timekeeper, map the matter lifecycle end to end, and identify the five workflows with the strongest ROI signal. You walk out with a roadmap, a readiness score, and a prioritized sequence. Fixed price, $3,500 to $8,500.
If the audit points to a clear first sprint, we scope it in writing. Written acceptance tests, a weekly demo, and a fixed band between $12,000 and $45,000. We build inside your environment (not a sandbox), train the team, and hand over a playbook your office manager can maintain.
Past that, Managed is a monthly retainer that keeps the workflows running, measures baseline against usage, and ships one to three new automations per quarter. Month-to-month, 30-day exit, no termination fee. For most small firms, two workflows in Managed cover the retainer in saved admin time alone.
The questions operators in this vertical actually ask on the first call.
Thirty minutes, a scoping call, a straight answer. If AI is not the right move for your firm this quarter, we'll tell you. If it is, we'll map out the first sprint with you.
