Industry · Professional Services
AI for the partner-led firm — legal, accounting, consulting.
The expertise lives in partners’ heads. The leverage lives in documents and time. We integrate AI into the systems your fee earners actually use — iManage, NetDocuments, Clio, PracticePanther, Karbon, CCH Axcess, Salesforce — so juniors and senior partners both move faster without changing the way the firm works.
What’s broken without AI in a professional-services firm
- Junior time gets burned on first drafts. First-draft memos, first-draft engagement letters, first-draft tax returns, first-draft audit working papers. The expensive partner reviews; the junior re-drafts. Hours that are realised on a bill but not on the firm’s margin.
- Time entry is a Friday-afternoon archaeology dig. Fee earners reconstruct the week from calendar invites and memory. Realisation rates suffer because narratives are vague. WIP write-offs compound silently.
- Institutional knowledge leaks with every senior departure. The matter management system has the documents; nobody has indexed them as an answerable knowledge base. Partners answer the same questions in email threads quarter after quarter.
- Conflict checks and intake friction. New-client intake bottlenecks at conflicts review, KYC, and engagement-letter generation. The deal closes; the engagement letter goes out a week late.
- Business development runs on relationships, not data. Partners know which clients are healthy because they’ve known them for ten years. The firm has no view of cross-sell, no view of dormant-but-recoverable accounts, no view of which referral sources actually produce realised revenue.
What we build for professional-services firms
Document automation with retrieval against your matter store
Engagement letters, NDAs, due-diligence checklists, audit working-paper templates, memos. Generated with retrieval from your iManage / NetDocuments / SharePoint, scoped to the client and matter type, with citation back to source documents. Partner reviews; juniors stop drafting from a blank page.
Time-tracking summary from calendar, email, and document activity
We aggregate Outlook calendar, Outlook / Gmail activity, document touches in iManage / NetDocuments, Teams call duration, and CRM entries — then draft narrative time entries per fee earner per day. The fee earner reviews and edits in their existing time system (Aderant, Elite 3E, Clio, PracticePanther, Karbon). Realisation goes up because narratives are specific.
Knowledge management for partner-led expertise
Retrieval-augmented search across your firm’s historical memos, opinions, audit files, advisory papers, training materials. A junior asks “how have we handled X for clients in industry Y?” and gets a synthesised answer with citations to the source matters. Senior departures stop being knowledge-loss events.
Intake, conflicts, and engagement-letter generation
New-client intake flow with automated conflicts screening, KYC document classification, and engagement-letter draft generation against your firm’s template library. Partner reviews and signs; intake time drops from days to hours.
Business-development intelligence on your client portfolio
We integrate your practice-management system, billing system, and CRM. Output: cross-sell opportunities by partner, dormant-recoverable accounts by industry, realisation-rate trends by matter type, and a referral-source ROI view that the managing partner can actually act on.
Hours back to the partner
In our recent professional-services engagements, the most consistent outcome is partner-level time recovered — the work that gets done on Sunday night gets done on Wednesday afternoon, against a draft that was already half-written.
The stacks we plug into
Legal: iManage, NetDocuments, Clio, PracticePanther, MyCase, Aderant, Elite 3E, SmartAdvocate, HighQ. Accounting: CCH Axcess, Karbon, Canopy, QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, Workiva. Consulting / advisory: Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Monday, Asana, Notion. Document and collaboration: SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Workspace, Teams, Slack.
Confidentiality, privilege, and where the data sits
Professional services run on confidentiality. We deploy AI integrations into your firm’s own Microsoft 365 tenant, your AWS / Azure / GCP account, or on-prem for the most sensitive matter types. Vendor models are accessed via no-retention endpoints; we recommend an internal acceptable-use policy alongside the deployment. Client-matter data never leaves your tenancy. We sign DPAs and outside-counsel guidelines as a matter of course.
Frequently asked
Will the AI hallucinate in a legal or audit context?
Hallucination is the failure mode partner-led firms care about most. Our pattern is retrieval-augmented — every generated output cites the source documents in your matter store. Outputs without a confident retrieval get flagged, not auto-sent. The model is constrained to your firm’s own corpus, not the open web.
Do we have to change our practice-management system?
No. AI sits alongside the practice-management system your firm has standardised on. Outputs land back in iManage / NetDocuments / Clio / Aderant via API. Fee earners keep using the system they trained on.
How do partners feel about the AI billing-narrative drafts?
Partners review and edit before billing; we never auto-submit narratives. Once trust builds — usually a few weeks — edit volumes drop sharply. The pattern is “AI drafts, human approves”, not autonomous billing.
What about outside-counsel guidelines and client AI restrictions?
We design the deployment so per-client AI restrictions can be enforced at the matter level. If a client’s OCGs prohibit certain AI use, that matter is excluded from the relevant pipelines automatically. We build the policy into the integration, not into a wiki page nobody reads.