AI for small law firms
Motions. Engagement letters. Intake notes. The answers are in there. Digging for them eats your day, and nobody pays you for it.
Ask your assistant in plain English. Get the answer, and the passage it came from, in under 30 seconds.
hours in a lawyer’s day never get billed. They disappear into admin, intake, searching and chasing.
Clio Legal Trends benchmark, 2025The searching and checking shrinks to seconds. Your people get their day back for real work.
On flat-fee and contingency work, every hour back is profit. 75% of solo firms already offer flat fees. Clio, 2025
9:47 p.m. You filed a motion just like this two years ago. Eleven folders later, you’re still looking.
Ask your assistant. In under 30 seconds: the exact paragraph, a plain-English summary, and a link to the page.
“What’s happening with my case?” Third call this week. Your paralegal drops everything to dig through emails.
Your paralegal has the answer in under 30 seconds. Your client gets a clear update, fast. Your paralegal gets back to work worthy of a human.
A new client walks in. Did you ever represent her, under her maiden name, or her company? Someone checks from memory and hopes.
“Yes. You represented Alvarez Roofing in 2023.” Your assistant answers in plain English, shows you the engagement letter, and you make the call.
Marlowe Kessler LLP is a made-up firm with a real-looking case file, a deal file, a conflicts index, firm policies, and the actual Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Ask what your associates ask each other all day. Every answer shows the exact passage it came from, and when the answer isn't in the files, it says so.
Pick an example or ask your own question. Every answer links to the exact passage it came from.
Do your billable work and leave. Dinner at the table. Weekends that stay weekends. A practice that doesn’t own you.
Pour those hours into billable work and new clients. Same team, more matters, more revenue, no new hire.
of a personal injury paralegal’s day, chasing medical records.
of her week. Now the firm expects to take on about twice the cases before hiring anyone.
Arctrieval case study, Shalhoub Law (vendor case study)
Someone opens the free, consumer version of ChatGPT to tighten a clause. It works. Soon the whole office is pasting client files into it. No rules.
The citations look perfect. They don’t exist. In Mata v. Avianca, the court fined the lawyers $5,000 and made them write to their own client, and to every judge the fake cases named.
Mata v. Avianca, S.D.N.Y. 2023In one review of 114 court cases with AI-invented citations, 90% of the firms were solo practices or 2 to 25 lawyers. ChatGPT was the tool named most.
Stanford CodeX, Oct 2025 (sample not comprehensive)In February 2026, a federal judge ruled that documents a defendant made with a consumer AI chatbot were not protected by attorney-client privilege.
United States v. Heppner, S.D.N.Y. 2026 (Debevoise summary)⚠️ And 57% of solo firms have no AI policy at all.
Clio 2026 Solo and Small Firm reportRuns on business AI services that don’t train on your data.
The exact passage and a link to the page. Nothing you can’t check.
People only see the matters they’re cleared for.
It reads and answers. Your people decide what leaves the firm.
Designed around ABA Formal Opinion 512. General information, not legal or ethics advice.
Clio, your inbox and your document system don’t talk to each other, so your team copies between them by hand. I connect your assistant to the tools you already use, so one question pulls from all of them. I handle the setup and keep it running.
The best case of the month calls at 7:15 p.m., gets voicemail, and calls the next firm. Instead, an AI receptionist answers, says it’s an AI, takes the details and has them waiting for you in the morning.
Record requests and missing-document reminders go out on schedule, with a list each morning of what’s overdue.
When a matter closes well, your happy client gets a friendly ask for a review or a referral, at the right moment, every time.
Plug in your own numbers.
Your team is spending
720 hours a year
on work a machine should be doing. That’s $108,000 of your time (48 working weeks).
That’s what you get back. Imagine your team with those hours.
Yes, when it’s set up right. No U.S. bar opinion bans it. ABA Formal Opinion 512 asks lawyers to protect confidentiality and know how their tools handle data, and saves its strictest rule for tools that train on what you put in. Your assistant doesn’t. I document how your data is stored and who can see it, so you have it on file.
It helps. 75% of solo firms and 65% of small firms already offer flat fees. On that work, plus contingency, every hour saved is profit. The rest of what it saves comes out of the five hours a day you never billed anyway.
They stop doing a machine’s job and start doing theirs. Trial prep instead of digging. Same-day call backs for every new client. Updates before clients have to ask. Same people, bigger jobs, more cases.
Your firm gets its own private document store, and every file is tied to its matter. Each person only sees what they’re cleared for. Every assistant goes through rigorous separation and accuracy testing, and it doesn’t go live until it passes.
Almost certainly. Clio, Smokeball, NetDocuments, iManage, MyCase and PracticePanther can all be connected. If your files live somewhere, your assistant can learn from them. I handle the technical side, so you never have to.
Your price isn’t based on the calculator. That number is what you get back. Your price depends on how many files you have and which tools we connect, and it’s set so the time you get back is worth far more than what you pay. You see the exact price before any work starts.
Every week you wait is more unbilled hours and more answers lost in your own files. Let’s get your assistant answering your firm’s questions.