Attua / Industries / Law firms
This page is laid out as the questions a principal actually asks, in roughly the order they get asked. Each answer says what a machine can carry and what has to stay with a lawyer.
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Before the questions
Most firms have already been sold something. A research add on, a drafting assistant inside Word, a note taker that joins every client meeting. What is usually missing is a decision about which parts of a matter a machine may touch, who checks what comes back, and where the file note that proves the checking happened is kept.
A practice runs on a matter: opened, worked, billed, closed, archived. LEAP, Actionstep, Smokeball or Clio holds the spine of that. The slow work sits in the gaps between the spine and the lawyer. The email chain nobody has summarised. The chronology built by hand. The costs disclosure rewritten for the fourth time this week. The eleven minute phone call that never became a time entry.
The answers below are deliberately narrow. If a drafted output cannot be checked by a person in less time than doing the job by hand would have taken, it is not worth building.
Q1
Four places, in most firms. Intake, where an enquiry has to become a matter with the correct parties, the correct dates and a signed costs agreement. Reading, where somebody has to get across a file they did not open. Drafting, where a precedent has to be shaped to these facts. And recording, where work that has already been done has to turn into a narration a client will pay without querying.
Limitation dates, settlement dates, court dates and undertakings are not the slow part. They are the dangerous part, and they get treated differently. A workflow may surface a date and put it in front of a person. It does not move one, waive one or write to the other side about one.
Who stays responsibleThe responsible solicitor owns every date on the file, exactly as now.
Q2
It can prepare the opening. It does not approve it. An enquiry arriving by phone, web form or referral gets turned into a structured matter opening pack: the client and any related entities, the other side and their solicitors, the property or company involved, the matter type, the responsible solicitor and the fee earner who will do the work.
From that pack it produces the list of names and entities your conflict search needs to run against, including trading names, former names and directors pulled out of the documents the client has already emailed through. A person runs the search in your practice management system and signs off on the result. That is the whole point: the slow part of a conflict check is assembling the names, not querying the database, and assembling names out of a rambling two page email and a scanned contract is precisely what a drafting agent is good at.
The same pack feeds the costs agreement and the costs disclosure, so disclosure obligations under the Legal Profession Act are met from what is on the file rather than from somebody's memory of a similar matter last year.
Who stays responsibleA solicitor clears the conflict and signs the costs agreement.
Q3
It looks like your precedent, with the facts of this matter in it, and with every inserted fact traceable to the document it came from. That last part is the difference between something a lawyer can check in four minutes and something they have to read from scratch anyway.
The useful version is narrow. Routine letters. Standard advice on a known matter type. A client update after a step is completed. A brief to counsel assembled from the file. A statement of facts drawn out of correspondence. The agent works from your precedent bank, not from whatever a general model has absorbed about Australian law, and where it cannot find a fact in the file it leaves the field marked as missing rather than filling it with something plausible.
Legal research and advice on the law are different work, and we treat them that way. A general model will produce case names and citations with total confidence and some of them will not exist. We do not build workflows that cite authority.
Who stays responsibleA lawyer reads every word before it leaves the firm.
Q4
A file review starts with a chronology. Dated, sourced, in order, with the gaps visible. Most firms build that by hand, usually a paralegal and a long afternoon, and it is the single most reliable thing to hand to an agent.
Give it the correspondence, the pleadings, the file notes and the attachments, and it returns a dated list with a reference back to the document and the page for every line. The lawyer reads the chronology, then opens the three or four documents that actually matter. On a litigation file that has been running for two years, or an estate with a dozen beneficiaries and a decade of letters, that turns a day into a morning.
It earns its place in two other moments as well: a file you are taking over after a staff departure, and a client ringing about a matter that has been dormant for eight months. The summary is never the source. The references are there because the lawyer still checks the source.
Who stays responsibleA chronology is a reading aid, not evidence. A lawyer verifies anything relied on.
Q5
Some of it. Australian firms still bill in six minute units, and the units that go missing are the ones nobody sat down to write up: the eleven minute call, the email answered from a car park, the twenty minutes spent reading something before a meeting started.
Email, calendar and document activity in LEAP or Actionstep already shows that the work happened. An agent can turn that activity into suggested entries with a draft narration for each, written the way a client expects to read one, for the fee earner to confirm, edit or discard before they finish up. Nobody's time is posted without them touching it.
Two design details decide whether this works. The suggestion has to arrive while the day is still fresh, because a prompt on Friday about Tuesday is worth nothing. And on fixed fee work the goal is not more billing at all, it is finally knowing what each matter type costs you to run.
Who stays responsibleEach fee earner confirms their own entries. Nothing posts automatically.
Q6
No. Trust money is handled by the people named in your trust account authorisations, inside your trust accounting software, under the Legal Profession Act and the regulation beneath it, and subject to external examination and the oversight of your law society. We do not build anything that initiates, approves or moves a trust transaction.
The paperwork around it is a different matter. A trust account statement that has to go out with a plain explanation of what each line means. A monthly reconciliation pack assembled in advance, so the person doing the reconciling is not also the person hunting for documents. A list of matters holding trust funds with no recent activity, ready for somebody to look at properly. The reconciliation itself is still performed and signed by a person, and the record of truth stays in the trust system.
Who stays responsibleTrust transactions and reconciliations stay with your authorised people.
Q7
That the firm uses software to prepare drafts and summaries, that a lawyer reviews all of it, and that their information sits in systems the firm controls. Most clients find that unremarkable. Corporate clients with their own policies will often want it in writing, and occasionally one will say no for a particular matter. That has to be workable without rebuilding anything, so individual matters can be marked as excluded and stay excluded.
In practice three documents get looked at: your costs agreement and engagement terms, your privacy policy, and any confidentiality undertakings already given on live matters. Client information is confidential under the Australian Solicitors Conduct Rules whatever a vendor's terms happen to say, so we use business grade accounts with training on your data switched off and keep client material out of consumer tools completely.
Who stays responsibleThe firm's confidentiality duty is unchanged by the tooling.
Q8
The lawyer who signed it. That does not shift, and none of this work is worth doing if it blurs the line. Supervision obligations apply to the output of a tool the same way they apply to the output of a junior: the supervising principal is accountable for work done under their supervision.
So the design question is not whether a model makes mistakes. It will. The question is whether the mistake is the kind a reviewer reliably catches. A chronology with a wrong date gets caught, because the reference is sitting right next to it. A fabricated citation buried in paragraph nine of an advice does not get caught on a busy Thursday, which is why we do not build that. Every workflow is shaped around what review can realistically detect.
Who stays responsibleThe supervising solicitor, as for any other work product.
By practice area
Contract dates and special conditions read out of the contract and into the matter, a settlement due list each morning, PEXA workspace steps checked against the file, and InfoTrack search results summarised instead of skim read.
Asset and liability schedules assembled from statements and valuations, correspondence histories reduced to a chronology, and beneficiary update letters drafted from what has actually happened on the file.
Disclosure documents indexed and organised, a dated chronology from a messy run of messages and emails, and a draft list of what is still outstanding before the next conference.
Incoming contracts marked up against your firm's standard positions, company and property searches summarised, and a plain client note explaining which clauses moved and why it matters.
Hundreds of pages of clinical records turned into a dated treatment chronology with references, so the solicitor reads the entries that bear on causation rather than all of them.
Email triaged by matter and urgency inside Outlook, draft file notes from a dictated summary after a call, and a weekly view of matters where nothing has been filed for a fortnight.
Starting
One practice area, one supervising partner, four to six weeks. Pick the area with the highest document volume rather than the one with the loudest complaints, because volume is what makes the difference visible. Three workflows is plenty for a first pass.
At the end of it the test is not enthusiasm, it is whether review takes less time than the old way. If you want the wider plan first, start with AI strategy, then AI implementation for the build.
Illustrative example, not a client story
Picture a deceased estate that stalled when a beneficiary stopped responding. The file holds eleven months of letters, three valuations, a bank statement bundle and file notes from two solicitors, one of whom has left the firm. Reading into it properly is most of a day, which is why it keeps being put off.
In this example the agent returns a dated chronology with a document reference on every line, an asset schedule drawn from the statements and valuations, and a short list of the four things the file is waiting on. The solicitor spends forty minutes checking the references that matter, then writes to the beneficiary the same morning. Illustrative example, not a client story.
Guardrails
Privilege and confidentiality set the boundary for everything here. We use business grade accounts with training on your data switched off, scope each workflow to the single system it needs rather than the whole network, and keep a record of which workflow produced which draft, so a file can show how a document came to exist. Where a matter is subject to a confidentiality undertaking or a client policy that rules this out, the matter is excluded and stays excluded.
The firm also needs an internal policy that staff can actually follow: what may be put into which tool, what must never be, and who to ask when it is unclear. Writing that with the team, and training them on it, is usually more valuable than any single workflow. That sits in AI training.
Every job is scoped up front after a Diagnostic. Sam is based in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, and travel is charged at cost from Brisbane. See the cost guide.
Questions
Law societies and courts in several states have issued guidance and practice notes on material prepared with generative tools. Used with supervision, proper care for confidentiality and verification of anything cited, it can sit inside your obligations. We build to the guidance that applies in your jurisdiction and keep a record of what each workflow was used for.
No. Advice is given by a lawyer who has read it and is prepared to stand behind it. Software prepares drafts and summaries for that lawyer to work from.
Work with high document volume and a repeatable shape. Conveyancing, wills and estates, personal injuries and parts of commercial work usually show something first. Bespoke advisory work benefits least.
Sometimes, because the principal is doing the admin personally. One well chosen workflow, such as chronologies or time capture, is usually worth more to a sole practitioner than a program of work. If a licence and an afternoon of setup would do it, I will say so.
It stays in business grade accounts you control, with training on your data switched off and each workflow limited to the one system it needs. Client files are not loaded into consumer tools.
Yes, and that is usually where lawyers want it, because the precedent and the email chain are already there. We also connect to LEAP, Actionstep, Smokeball or Clio for matter data, so a draft starts with the right parties and the right dates.
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