Precedent and knowledge assistants
Search and drafting support grounded in the firm's own precedent library and prior work, with citations to the source document and permission-aware retrieval by matter and team.
Industry
Professional services
Document-heavy, expertise-led work where time recovery and consistency of output determine margin.
Services most used here
- Agentic AI & Automation
- Application Development
- Cybersecurity & Compliance
- Managed Services & Support
Context
What makes this sector different
In legal, accounting, engineering consultancy and similar practices, the constraint is qualified people's time. A large share of it goes on drafting from precedent, reviewing documents for specific clauses or figures, assembling client reporting, and administering matters rather than advising on them.
This is the work AI is genuinely good at supporting — with the important caveat that professional judgement and privilege cannot be delegated. Every design decision we make here keeps the practitioner accountable for the output while removing the mechanical effort of producing a first version.
This page sets out how our capabilities apply to this sector's operating pressures. It is not a claim of prior engagements in it. The solution patterns we publish are labelled as designs rather than completed engagements, and we will tell you directly where a requirement would be new to us.
Operating pressures
- Chargeable time consumed by drafting, review and matter administration
- Inconsistent output quality across practitioners and offices
- Client confidentiality and privilege constraining what tools may be used
- Knowledge held with individuals, lost when they move on
- Fixed-fee and capped-fee work where efficiency determines profitability
- Conflict checking and onboarding that delay work starting
Where we would start
Use cases that tend to pay back first
Ordered by how quickly the result can be verified. Where output is easy to check, automation carries less risk.
Document review and extraction
Extracting defined terms, dates, obligations and figures from contracts and reports into a reviewable structure, flagging anything ambiguous for a practitioner instead of resolving it silently.
Client reporting automation
Assembling recurring client reports from matter and financial data, leaving the practitioner to review and add judgement rather than compile.
Matter intake and triage
Structured intake with conflict and completeness checks at the front door, so matters open cleanly and administration does not accumulate.
Research and decision support
Agents that gather and summarise source material with citations, presenting an evidence base for a professional to evaluate rather than a conclusion to adopt.
Governance
Constraints we design to from the start
These are the requirements that decide the architecture in this sector. Retrofitting any of them means rebuilding, so they are settled during design.
- Client confidentiality boundaries enforced technically, not by policy alone
- Matter-level access controls reflected in what any assistant can retrieve
- Professional judgement and sign-off retained by a qualified person on every output
- Clear disclosure of where AI assisted, where the firm's obligations require it
- Data residency and processing terms compatible with client engagement letters
- No client data used to train external models; processing terms documented
Related
Services and solutions for this sector
Agentic AI & Automation
AI agents, assistants and automated workflows that carry out real work inside your systems, with human approval at the points that matter.
Application Development
Secure, maintainable web and mobile applications — new builds, AI-enabled products, and the modernisation of systems that have become risky to change.
Cybersecurity & Compliance
Security engineering, assurance and compliance support — including the controls specific to AI systems.
Managed Services & Support
Advisory, managed IT and application support — the long-term accountability that keeps a delivered system healthy.
Relevant solutions
Illustrative solution pattern
Grounded knowledge assistant
An assistant that answers staff questions from your approved documents, cites its sources, and declines when the corpus does not cover the question.
Read the full write-upIllustrative solution patternDocument intake and extraction
Structured data extracted from inbound documents, with confidence surfaced and a person confirming before anything is committed.
Read the full write-upIllustrative solution patternOperations dashboard on governed data
A single operational view built on agreed metric definitions, with visible freshness and drill-through to source records.
Read the full write-upWorking in professional services?
Tell us which of these pressures you recognise and which you would put first. We will come back with an honest view of whether we are the right people for it.
We reply to every enquiry within one business day.