A mid-sized commercial law firm with a corporate and transactional practice.
First-pass contract review in about five minutes. Lawyers back to the work clients pay for.
The issue
Associates were spending a third of their time on first-pass contract review — the routine agreements that make up most of the inbound paper. Deadlines lived in a calendar and slipped a few times the year before, one of them nearly costing a client a deal. The friction around logging time meant a real slice of billable hours never got recorded. The managing partner told us he didn't want the firm replacing lawyers — he wanted lawyers spending their time on the work clients actually pay for.
Discovery & analysis
- Six months of contracts across the most common types taught the system the firm's house style — what they accept, what they negotiate, what the partners always mark up.
- Preferences varied partner by partner: some mark-ups were firm policy, many were individual judgment no associate would pick up without a year on that partner's desk.
- The deadline history pointed straight at the few specific ways a deadline actually got missed.
How we worked with the team
- The managing partner was on every significant decision; this was partner-led from the start.
- A working group of associates gave feedback every week through the build — the house style the system uses is theirs, not ours.
- Their compliance officer was in for the data-handling design; client-confidentiality controls were reviewed before a single contract touched the system.
What we built & shipped
- A contract comes in by email or gets dropped in, and the system produces a first-pass mark-up against the firm's house style with the reasoning for each change, plus a clause-by-clause summary for the partner.
- The marked-up document is filed, and the partner gets a one-screen review: accept everything, change it clause by clause, or send it back to the associate.
- Key dates are pulled out, calendar entries created, and a conflict check run against the firm's matter list before anyone starts work.
- Time gets captured as people actually work, instead of reconstructed at the end of the day; associates approve it and it flows to billing.
Outcome
Time that used to go unrecorded now gets billed — that alone recovers a strong six figures a year — and billable hours per lawyer went up noticeably.
First-pass contract review went from most of a working day to about five minutes. The conflict check went from a couple of days to a few hours.
No missed deadlines in over a year, against a few the year before. No conflicts slipped through in operation.
- Their internal conversation about keeping associates shifted from "they're overworked" to "they're growing".
Where it stands now
Ongoing, and we haven't handed it off. Being scoped next: the same approach applied to the partner's first call with a prospective client.
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