A law firm's operating knowledge lives in many places: a written intake procedure, an assistant's checklist, the partner who knows which exception needs attention. Building an AI workflow starts by capturing that knowledge and agreeing what the prepared work should contain.
The opportunity is practical. Put the familiar draft, review or handoff in front of the right person with its sources and unresolved questions clear. The firm's responsible lawyer sets the standard; the workflow is built and tested against it.
Four useful jobs to start from.
Illustrative examples.
A court order becomes a draft notice. The assistant supplies the order and handling lawyers. The workflow prepares the directives in the court's words, one per line, with a coded check that dates in the draft appear in the order. Unreadable material and deadlines needing calculation are flagged. The assistant reviews the notice; the attorney confirms its effect.
The week's open matters become a review list. The operations manager supplies the case-system export. The workflow lists owners, overdue and unowned tasks, and matters needing attention, with draft follow-up notes. It distinguishes records assessed from records it could not assess.
A new inquiry becomes an intake review. Names from the inquiry are compared with the firm's export of clients and adverse parties. The result brings possible matches and the inquiry details together for the responsible attorney to assess under the firm's conflict procedure.
A role and start date become a first-week plan. The workflow uses the firm's onboarding know-how to prepare what to read, who to sit with and what to learn by Friday. The manager adapts the plan and judges progress.
The firm's way of working makes these useful.
A general request to “summarize this order” leaves much unstated. Your procedure may require a particular format, named recipients, source references and a separate list of points for an attorney. Those details are the build's starting point.
If they are already documented, we work from them. If the experienced assistant or operations manager carries them in their head, we walk through past examples and write the approach down together. The procedure owner reviews it before the build.
Keep the responsibilities clear.
For the initial workflows described here:
- An attorney confirms dates; the workflow does not calculate legal deadlines.
- The workflow reads supplied case records and prepares output for review.
- A person sends messages and changes case-system records.
- Legal questions go to the responsible lawyer.
- The firm approves the workspace for the information involved.
- The responsible lawyer agrees the standard used to test the work.
We build with invented examples and observe your people testing real matters in your own account. We see the material on screen without receiving or keeping copies. Decisions about the firm's professional obligations remain with its lawyers.
Test the awkward case as well as the ordinary one.
A buried directive, an unreadable page or a missing owner can tell you more than another clean demonstration. Agree what the workflow should do in each case, then review the actual output against that expectation.
At handover, your people have the workflow, written procedure, test findings and notes for using it. Measure preparation and review together. The aim is to make the firm's own good practice easier to put into everyday use.