Tools that changed how forty legal teams work.
Four projects, four kinds of legal team. Each one began with us sitting beside the people who would use it. Each one is still running today.
Case study index
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Hollis & Marr LLPDue diligence review platform LLM-assisted first-pass review inside iManage, with every finding cited to the page it came from.62% fewer first-pass review hours
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Northgate EnergyContract lifecycle & obligation tracking Playbook redlining in Word, with signed obligations extracted into a tracker that alerts before every date.4 hrs NDA turnaround, down from 6 days
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Calder Street ChambersMatter intake & clerking system Structured intake, conflict pre-screen and automatic allocation. The spreadsheet was retired in week one.3× faster instruction turnaround
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Vireo HealthRegulatory change monitor Fourteen regulators watched. Every change mapped to a policy, an owner and an attestation.0 missed filing deadlines in 18 months
Due diligence review platform
Context
Hollis & Marr's M&A group runs thirty to forty live deals at a time. Each one starts the same way: a data room of a few thousand documents, and a team of associates reading them for change-of-control clauses, assignment restrictions, and anything else that could surprise the buyer. First-pass review took close to half of a junior associate's time on a deal. It was also the part of the job they liked least.
The firm had trialled two off-the-shelf review tools. Neither talked to iManage, so documents were exported, reviewed elsewhere, and the results copied back by hand. Partners did not trust the output, because they could not see where a finding had come from.
What we built
A review platform that lives inside the firm's existing workflow. Data rooms sync from iManage. A private Azure OpenAI deployment does a first pass against the deal's issue list. Associates confirm, reject or escalate each finding, and every finding links to the page it came from.
- Issue lists per deal type, drafted with the partners and maintained by the Knowledge team
- Findings cited to document, page and clause, opening in iManage in one click
- Confirm / reject / escalate workflow with a full audit trail per associate
- One-click export into the firm's due diligence report template in Word
Vendor consent required on any change in control of the Target. Consent may be withheld at the Vendor's discretion.
Agreement may not be assigned without prior written consent of the Supplier, not to be unreasonably withheld.
Distributor granted exclusive rights for the UK and Ireland until 31 December 2028.
They shadowed our associates for three weeks before writing a line of code. That's why it worked.
- 01Discovery3 wks
- 02Design3 wks
- 03Build10 wks
- 04RunSince 2021
Contract lifecycle & obligation tracking
Context
Northgate's legal team is forty-five lawyers supporting a business of eleven thousand people. Most of what crossed their desks was routine: NDAs, supply agreements, variations. Each still went through a lawyer, a Word document and an email chain. An NDA took six days on average, and parts of the business had started going around legal to get things signed.
Nobody could say with confidence what the company had already agreed to. Eleven thousand executed contracts sat in a shared drive and two retired systems. Renewal dates and notice periods were tracked by whoever happened to remember them.
What we built
A clause library and playbook that runs as a Word add-in, so lawyers redline in the tool they already use. Standard positions are applied automatically; deviations are flagged with the fallback the playbook allows. Once a contract is signed, its obligations are extracted into a tracker that alerts the owner ahead of every date.
- Word add-in with playbook-driven redlining and one-click fallback positions
- Self-service NDA route for the business, with only the exceptions reaching legal
- Obligation extraction into a tracker with owners, alerts and a 90-day forward view
- Migration of 11,000 legacy contracts, deduplicated and tagged by type and counterparty
3. Term
This Agreement shall remain in force for a period of five (5) years two (2) years from the Effective Date, unless terminated earlier in accordance with clause 8.
7. Governing law
This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of New York England and Wales, and the parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of New York County the courts of England and Wales.
9. Non-solicitation
Neither party shall, for a period of twelve (12) months following termination, solicit for employment any employee of the other party with whom it had material contact.
| Contract | Obligation | Due | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acme Supply · NDA | Return confidential information | 12 Nov | Alert · 30d |
| Meridian · MSA | Annual price review notice | 01 Dec | On track |
| Helios Wind · PPA | Insurance certificate renewal | 15 Jan | On track |
Our NDAs used to take six days. Now the business gets them back the same afternoon, and legal only sees the exceptions.
- 01Discovery3 wks
- 02Design3 wks
- 03Build10 wks
- 04RunSince 2022
Matter intake & clerking system
Context
Calder Street is a set of eighty barristers with a clerks' room of twelve. Instructions arrived by email, by phone and, increasingly, through solicitors' own portals. The clerks tracked them in a spreadsheet: who had been asked, who had a conflict, who was free, what had been quoted. It worked because the senior clerk had been there for twenty-two years.
It did not scale. Conflict checks were manual and slow, allocation depended on memory, and chambers had no clear picture of how long an instruction sat before counsel was confirmed. Solicitors had noticed.
What we built
An intake and clerking system built around the clerks' room. Solicitors submit instructions through a structured form or by forwarding an email. The system pre-screens for conflicts against chambers' matter history, proposes counsel by practice area, seniority and availability, and tracks each instruction against a turnaround target until it is accepted.
- Structured intake by form or email, with documents captured into the matter record
- Conflict pre-screen against fifteen years of matter history, with clerk sign-off
- Allocation suggestions from practice area, seniority, diary and fee band
- A live pipeline board for the clerks' room, which replaced the spreadsheet on day one
Farrow Ward LLP · Shareholder dispute, urgent injunction
Hadley Price · Construction of a discretionary trust
Marlow Kane · Supply chain arbitration, LCIA
Orme & Lister · Rights of light, Southwark
Brand & Rowe · Restrictive covenants, expedited
Penrose Legal · Unfair dismissal appeal, EAT
Every AI finding links straight to the page in the document. Our partners actually trust it.
- 01Discovery3 wks
- 02Design3 wks
- 03Build10 wks
- 04RunSince 2023
Regulatory change monitor
Context
Vireo runs hospitals, clinics and a pharmacy group across three jurisdictions, which puts it in front of fourteen regulators. Each publishes changes on its own schedule, in its own format. The compliance team learned about them through newsletters, law firm alerts and, occasionally, the press.
Once a change was spotted, mapping it to the policies it affected was a manual exercise. Confirming that the right people had read and applied the updated policy was a spreadsheet and a chase. Two filing deadlines were missed in the year before we started.
What we built
A monitor that watches all fourteen regulators, classifies every change, and maps it to the internal policies and obligations it touches. Policy owners receive a task with the change and its impact. Attestations are collected, chased and recorded, and every deadline sits on one calendar with an audit trail behind it.
- Monitoring of fourteen regulators' publications, with classification and de-duplication
- Change-to-policy mapping reviewed by the compliance team before anything is routed
- Attestation routing to policy owners in Teams, with reminders and escalation
- A single obligations calendar with an audit trail fit for regulator inspection
Regulation 12: revised guidance on medicines reconciliation at admission
Field safety notice: volumetric infusion pumps, firmware 4.2
Updated guidance on subject access request timelines
We stopped finding out about rule changes from the newspaper.
- 01Discovery3 wks
- 02Design3 wks
- 03Build10 wks
- 04RunSince 2024
What they have in common.
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01
We shadowed the team first.
Every project began with two to three weeks beside the people who would use the tool. Not workshops. Their desk, their inbox, their Tuesday afternoon. The specification was written afterwards, and it was short.
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02
The tool lives inside the software they already use.
Nobody learned a new system. The review platform is inside iManage. The playbook is a Word add-in. The clerks' board opens from Outlook. The change feed lands in Teams. Adoption was never a project of its own.
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03
We still run it today.
All four are hosted, monitored and improved by us. The oldest has been live for five years and still ships a release most months. None of the teams has had to hire someone to look after it.
Have a workflow like one of these?
Tell us what your team does on a Tuesday afternoon. We will tell you, honestly, whether a custom tool would help.