Forward-deployed in professional services
Put what the firm knows to work.
We embed engineers with your partners, practice leaders, and finance team to build AI into proposals, matter intake, drafting, and billing. It works from the firm’s own precedents, inside the walls and permissions that already govern who sees what.
Where the hours go
- Precedent nobody can find
- Proposals rebuilt each time
- Late time, rewritten bills
- Knowledge that walks out
What a pod builds
- Precedent and knowledge search
- Proposal and RFP drafts
- Intake, conflicts, and engagement letters
- Time narratives and pre-bill review
What gets measured
- Time to open a new matter, conflicts included
- Hours per proposal and win rate
- Time-entry lag and narrative rework
- Realization, write-downs, and lockup days
What is different here
A firm’s inventory is its past work, and nearly all of it is confidential: much belongs to clients, some is privileged, and ethical walls decide who may open it. Document management, conflicts, and time and billing systems encode those duties. AI that bypasses them is a professional-liability problem; AI built inside them gives each professional everything they are cleared to see.
I / Where the hours go
What we look for first.
Precedent nobody can find
The right clause, deck, or memo exists somewhere in the DMS, but search runs on file names and memory, so people start from blank pages or email the whole practice.
Proposals rebuilt each time
Every RFP and pitch is assembled from old decks, bios, and engagement summaries by senior people late at night, with credentials and rates copied forward by hand.
Late time, rewritten bills
Time is reconstructed at week’s end, narratives miss client billing guidelines, and pre-bill review becomes partners rewriting entries while invoices (and cash) wait.
Knowledge that walks out
When a partner retires or a manager leaves, the context behind clients, matters, and methods leaves too, because it lived in their heads and inboxes rather than anywhere searchable.
II / What we build
Systems, not slideware.
Precedent and knowledge search
Answers questions in plain language across the DMS, past deliverables, and matter files, returning passages linked to source, and only what the person’s permissions and ethical walls already let them open.
Proposal and RFP drafts
Assembles first drafts of proposals and RFP responses from approved credentials, bios, past engagements, and the opportunity record in your CRM. The pursuit lead edits, prices, and signs off.
Intake, conflicts, and engagement letters
Pre-fills new-matter intake from the request, runs parties and affiliates through your conflicts and independence checks, summarizes hits for the conflicts team to clear, and drafts the engagement letter from approved templates.
Time narratives and pre-bill review
Drafts time-entry narratives from calendars, documents, and email for the timekeeper to confirm, then checks pre-bills against each client’s billing guidelines before a partner reviews. It never adds hours.
Research memos, cited
Drafts first-pass research memos with every authority linked to its source, and marks anything it could not verify. A lawyer or senior professional checks each citation before the memo leaves the firm.
Client reporting
Drafts status reports, matter updates, and engagement summaries from what was actually recorded (time, milestones, budget burn, open items) for the relationship lead to edit and send.
Resourcing and staffing
Suggests teams for new work from skills, experience, and availability in Workday, Kantata, or your PSA, screened against conflicts and independence, and shows its reasoning. The resource manager makes the call.
Knowledge capture
Interviews departing and retiring professionals with structured questions, ties their answers to clients and matters, and files them where successors already search, with the same access controls as the source work.
III / A first vintage
Narratives and pre-bill checks
First production deployment, Six to ten weeks
A pod connects to your time and billing system, encodes the billing guidelines of your largest clients, and works beside the billing team through two consecutive month-end pre-bills, drafting narratives for timekeepers and flagging entries before partner review.
Judged by
Write-downs at pre-bill, days from period end to invoice, and partner hours spent in review, read against the pre-bills sampled in the Survey.
An illustration of a first deployment, not a description of a past client.
IV / What we measure
Baselined before we build.
- Time to open a new matter, conflicts included
- Hours per proposal and win rate
- Time-entry lag and narrative rework
- Realization, write-downs, and lockup days
- Utilization by level
- Time to find prior work
- Citation errors caught in review
Set during the Survey and reported every season after.
Systems we work inside
Your stack, not ours.
- iManage
- NetDocuments
- Clio
- Aderant
- Elite 3E
- Intapp
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Microsoft 365 and SharePoint
- Workday
- Kantata
- Certinia
- Harvest
- Loopio
Named for familiarity, not partnership. We integrate with what you already run and recommend new tools only when the work requires them.
V / Guardrails
Where people stay in control.
Walls hold in retrieval
Search and drafting inherit your DMS permissions and ethical walls at query time, so no one sees a client’s documents through AI that they could not open directly.
Model Rules and Opinion 512
For law firms, we design to Formal Opinion 512 and ABA Model Rules 1.1, 1.6, and 5.3: firm policy governs each tool, vendors are vetted, and no client information enters a self-learning tool without informed consent.
Independence and quality
For CPA firms, each tool is documented in the quality management system SQMS No. 1 requires and scoped to the AICPA Code’s independence and confidentiality rules, so the firm never hosts an attest client’s data or records.
Fair billing, disclosed use
AI-assisted time entries are tagged for pre-bill review, hourly matters bill only time actually spent, and clients are told how AI was used when they ask or their terms require it, as Opinion 512 expects.
Staffing stays with people
Staffing suggestions show their reasoning, and the resource manager makes every assignment. The EU AI Act classes AI that allocates work based on personal traits or characteristics as high-risk, with obligations from December 2027, and we design to it.
Related
Work that tends to travel with this.
Legal & compliance
Contract review, obligations, privacy requests, and audit evidence: faster, with counsel deciding.
Sales & revenue
Account research, CRM notes, proposals, and forecasts. More time selling, and a number you can defend.
People & talent
Interview logistics, HR questions, onboarding, and reviews, while people make every hiring and pay decision.
Finance & FP&A
Forecasts, variance commentary, cash, and the board pack: sooner, with every number owned by finance.
Begin with the Survey.
Two to three weeks inside your operation, a fixed fee agreed up front, and a ranked plan you keep whether or not we build it together.