The firm needed its AI budget to reduce partner review work
The firm wanted to raise profit per equity partner, but its AI reports counted seats and logins. Those reports couldn't tell leadership whether lawyers were finishing useful work faster, which is why we began the engagement in early 2025 by studying a working week in their transactional practices.
We followed first drafts through partner review and revision. Only 18% passed without a partner changing a standard firm position, and median partner review took 75 minutes per primary deal document. Associates then spent 5.2 hours a week revising after review, so the same draft consumed time on both sides of the handoff.
The review changes showed us where to intervene. Of the overrides partners made, 64% concerned standard positions, and 81% of those matched a position the same partner had taken on an earlier deal. The partners were repeatedly applying decisions they already knew, but those decisions lived in old mark-ups and closed deals. Associates and drafting tools had no approved shared standard to apply before sending the draft back.
We captured the standard so lawyers could use it earlier
Buying another drafting tool wouldn't supply the firm's unwritten decisions. We first drew candidate positions from the partners' prior work and reviewed the reasoning with them, so they could decide which positions should govern new drafts.
Once partners approved those positions, we configured the firm's existing tools to use them. We also built a check that compared drafts with the approved positions before partner review. Each flag linked to supporting prior-deal material, so a lawyer could inspect the reason for a proposed change and address it before the partner repeated the correction.
We tested the check on closed deals using earlier material as its sources. It passed the agreed technical test, and the first practice group adopted it and retired its old drafting route. But that success didn't establish that the other groups were ready, and we'd committed to one rollout target across all four.
Our rollout plan depended on decisions we hadn't secured
Two groups still had incomplete approved positions. Their partners were handling closings, so the approval work we needed competed with their immediate client work. We treated the delay as a scheduling item and carried on with a target that assumed those groups could use a standard they hadn't finished.
We'd also proposed crediting build and adoption work against billable targets, because partners and associates were being asked to support the new process while still being measured on billable hours. But we hadn't checked when the compensation process could approve that credit. The decision was outside our delivery window, leaving a dependency our remedy work couldn't resolve on its own.
There was an engineering gap too. Two position types needed for credit agreements were missing from our approved set, which meant the check declined documents it needed to handle. We were responsible for that gap and for committing to department-wide coverage before these dependencies were resolved.
At the Launch review, only 41% of eligible documents had gone through the check before partner review. We'd committed to at least 70%, so we declared the miss and began four additional weeks of work at no charge.
Four extra weeks improved coverage, but didn't meet the commitment
We started with the missing credit-agreement positions because the check couldn't assess those documents without them. We captured the positions with a partner, obtained approval, and tested the change. The share of finance documents the check declined fell from 14% to 3%, removing that obstacle to use.
But technical coverage wasn't the only obstacle. We helped a senior partner demonstrate the check on live work and worked with the firm to assign document volumes through the new route. Those steps gave the groups a visible example and a concrete expectation for using it, while the compensation decision remained unresolved.
Coverage reached 52% after the four weeks. That was progress, but it was still below the agreed 70%, so we refunded the $25,000 Launch allocation under the engagement's terms. We completed training and handover during the remedy period because the firm needed to own and operate the work even though we'd missed our commitment.
Later gains didn't erase the missed rollout
The firm later approved billable credit and completed more position sets. Those changes addressed the remaining approval and incentive gaps, and coverage eventually reached 74%. That later result didn't change what we'd delivered by the agreed deadline.
As more work used the approved standard, department first-draft acceptance rose from 18% to 59%, just below the 60% target. Median partner review fell from 75 to 36 minutes, and associates' weekly revision work fell from 5.2 to 2.9 hours.
The standard also let the firm compare its tools against the same requirements. It reduced licensed seats and ended a pilot after that comparison, cutting annual tool costs by about $210,000 before operating costs and $120,000 after the cost of running the check.
In the earlier full-year measurement, net income margin rose from 36% to 37.1%. The CFO attributed about 40% of that gain to the drafting and review change, with the rest coming from rates and work mix. The chair later confirmed a 38% net income margin run rate and $790,000 in profit per equity partner, a $111,000 increase from $679,000. That closed about 80% of the gap to the $820,000 profit goal.
We'd trained the knowledge team to add positions, rerun the evaluation, and publish approved changes, so progress could continue after handover. The team shipped a new position set without us before we left and later extended the check to another practice group independently.
What this failure taught us
We should have set each group's rollout commitment against its approved positions, available partner time, and compensation decision date. A working check in one group didn't make the others ready, and a dependency outside our schedule couldn't be solved by extending the build.
The firm gained lower costs, less review work, and the ability to keep building. But we hadn't fully delivered what we'd committed to. That is why we provided the extra work and refund, and why this case includes both the financial gains and the failure that came before them.
We've carried these lessons into every engagement we've done since, and the results speak for themselves.
We helped this law firm increase profit per equity partner by $111,000 by finding and removing a bottleneck in their drafting workflow.
If you’re a law firm leader and want to grow your firm without making partners carry more work, we’ll identify the biggest bottleneck standing in your way, build the plan to remove it, and implement it in eight weeks* or less - guaranteed or we continue to work for free and you don’t pay.
Find my bottleneck* Eight-week delivery, or twelve weeks when substantial data foundations are required, as agreed before work begins. If a covered stage fails its agreed benchmarks, we provide up to four additional weeks of remedy work at no charge, then waive or refund that stage’s fee if it still fails. Successfully delivered stages remain payable. Agreed client-caused delays pause the clock. Delivery guarantee terms.