Reading, searching and formulating is where the margin goes, and it is exactly the work that looks most automatable. It is also work covered by the confidentiality of the mandate under § 203 StGB, which is why a client matter in the wrong chat window is a professional risk rather than a shortcut. The useful question is not whether to use AI, but which task may run where — and how you stop it inventing a citation.
Few professions spend as many billable-adjacent hours reading, searching and drafting. Large firms are building their own legal-AI capability; smaller ones are told to wait, or handed consumer tools that are not defensible for a mandate.
There is a second problem specific to this field, and most vendors skate over it: a language model will produce a citation that looks perfect and does not exist. In this profession that is not an inconvenience, it is a filing you cannot make.
So the architecture has to answer two questions at once — where the matter is allowed to be processed, and how every assertion is tied back to a source you can open.
Not every office needs all of these. Which ones are worth building depends on your workflows, your systems and what the hours actually cost you.
Structured first drafts of routine documents in the firm's established patterns. The lawyer sharpens and signs; the blank page stops being the expensive part.
Search across material the firm holds or licenses, with every passage traced to its source. Where nothing is found, the honest answer is nothing found.
Opposing briefs and contracts broken down: what is being argued, where the internal contradictions sit, what is missing — before the real work starts.
Your own drafts, model cases and internal notes, searchable and answering. What the firm solved once, it finds again in seconds.
Assembling what a matter needs before a hearing or a filing, so preparation is checking rather than hunting.
Advise, assess, decide or sign. It also does not get trusted on a citation it cannot show you the source for — that is a hard rule in how these systems get built, not a disclaimer.
Three routes are normally on the table, and the right one is decided per task rather than per company.
If tools already cleared by your organisation can do the job, using what you have is usually the shortest route and the easiest to defend.
For work that does not touch confidential material, a European service under a proper processing agreement is often the proportionate answer.
Where genuinely confidential material is processed, keeping the system inside the building can be the more sensible option. It is a possible answer, not automatically the right one.
Nothing gets built before the numbers are on the table. The first step is short, deliberately bounded, and useful even if you stop there.
One to two weeks. Your workflows mapped, the real effort quantified, the data classes sorted, your systems examined for what they actually allow — ending in a prioritised list and a plan for the first thing worth doing. The report is yours to keep.
One use case taken to production against acceptance criteria agreed in advance, measured against the baseline from the check, and handed over with the training to run it.
Keeping it current and monitored once it is live, with a periodic review of whether it is still earning its place — and the training record the EU AI Act expects of anyone whose staff use AI.
Scope, timing and a fixed price are agreed in writing before any work begins.
An honest filter costs both of us less than a wasted first meeting.
No. A large part of the useful work involves no client-identifying material. Where a matter is genuinely involved, the check establishes what is defensible first, with the confidentiality of the mandate as the frame.
By building so that the system answers from material you supply or license and shows the passage it used. An assertion without a traceable source is treated as a failure, not as output. That is a design decision, and it is the first thing to test in any tool you are shown.
It is built to sit beside them. What can actually be exported or connected is verified in the check rather than assumed.
The lawyer, entirely, exactly as with work prepared by a junior. Nothing is configured to file or send by itself.
From the hours your firm currently spends on the affected work, against the expected effort of the solution. Where it does not carry itself, the report says so.
A rough picture of where the hours go — drafting, research, document review, internal questions — is enough to tell whether there is anything here worth building for a firm your size.
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