Solos and small firms. The three places AI moves the needle, the malpractice traps to avoid, and the Clio or MyCase integration spec.
Solo and small-firm lawyers have three places where AI moves real revenue: intake, research, and billing. The malpractice traps are real but well-understood. Below: the three workflows, the Clio or MyCase integration spec, and what each pays back.
Below is the production stack we ship for this category. It is opinionated. Other stacks work. This one ships in 72 hours and survives a real-world Monday morning.
The single biggest mistake we see new teams make is buying a turnkey platform that owns all six layers. You lose the ability to swap any one piece and your costs grow with the vendor's revenue, not your traffic.
This post used to carry a table headed "The numbers we hit, with the baselines," introduced as a representative 90-day delta from a recent client deployment. No deployment produced those numbers. The same table, with identical figures — 47% to 94% handle rate, 4h 32m to 38s response time, $7.10 to $1.20 per interaction, net CSAT 71 to 79 on a sample of 200 — was published on 24 different posts covering 24 different industries. Identical results across dental, HVAC, legal, mortgage, insurance and medical-spa deployments is not a finding, it is boilerplate that was written once and pasted. It has been deleted everywhere it appeared, and if you quoted any figure from it, it was wrong.
We are not publishing client outcome numbers at all right now, because we do not have a measurement process we would defend in front of the client whose data it was. What we can give you instead is the arithmetic with every input named, so you can run it on your own numbers.
| Input | Where you get it | Example value |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts per month in this channel | Telephony or helpdesk export | 400 |
| Share currently unhandled | Same export: unanswered, abandoned, unreplied | 25% |
| Share of those an agent would handle | Assumption. Start conservative | 60% |
| Close rate on handled contacts | Your CRM, trailing 90 days | 35% |
| Value of one closed outcome | Your CRM, trailing 90 days | $420 |
Recovered revenue per month = contacts x unhandled share x agent-handled share x close rate x outcome value. On the example inputs: 400 x 0.25 x 0.60 x 0.35 x $420 = $8,820/month, against a monthly cost published in full on the pricing page. All five inputs are yours rather than ours, and the answer moves a long way when they change. That is a model, and it is labelled as one.
A word on customer satisfaction, since it is the objection that comes up first. The conventional wisdom is that customers hate AI on the phone. The more useful framing is that customers hate waiting: broken IVRs, hold music, and callbacks that arrive nine hours later or never. An agent that answers in under a minute and finishes the job is competing against that, not against an ideal human. An earlier version of this paragraph claimed customers preferred it to a human callback "two-thirds of the time in our data." There was no such data and that figure has been deleted. Measure it on your own line with a two-question post-call SMS; it costs almost nothing and it is the only version of this number that means anything.
1. Intake. AI handles the initial intake call or chat. Captures who, what, when, conflict-check inputs. Does NOT give legal advice. Hands off to a paralegal for case opening.
2. Research. Internal copilot for attorneys, sitting on top of Westlaw or Lexis. Drafts case summaries, suggests citations, flags unfavorable precedent. Always with citation links.
3. Billing. Drafts time entries from calendar + email metadata. Attorney reviews and submits.
Clio integration: pull matters, write time entries (draft only), write notes. We do NOT have the AI write to billable hours or invoices without human approval.
Typical ROI: 4-8 attorney hours/week recovered at $250-400/hr. Pays for the stack many times over.
The build sprint below runs on a 72-hour clock. That is the engineering, not the engagement: our published promise is live in 21 days from kickoff, which wraps this sprint in scoping, evals, shadow mode and cutover. If you see "72 hours" and "21 days" on this site and wonder which is true, both are — one is the part where code gets written.
Hour 0-8. Kickoff. Interview the two people who do this job today. Pull 50 sample inputs (calls, chats, tickets). Establish baseline metrics. Identify the three top customer intents.
Hour 8-24. First-pass prompt. Wire the orchestration. Stand up the eval harness with 25 cases drawn from the sample inputs. The eval harness has to exist before the first prompt does.
Hour 24-40. Integrations. CRM webhook, calendar booking, payment link if relevant. Each integration ships with a synchronous confirmation path.
Hour 40-56. Internal QA. The two people we interviewed in hour 0 spend 90 minutes running the agent through their hardest scenarios. Their feedback drives the second-pass prompt.
Hour 56-68. Shadow traffic. Real customer interactions, AI answers, human reviews before the answer is sent. We are looking for any case where the AI's draft is worse than the human's draft.
Hour 68-72. Cutover. We flip the routing rule, monitor for the first hour, and hand off the on-call rotation to the client's champion. The implementer stays on standby for 7 days.
Operator note: The 72-hour clock is real but it assumes the client has decided on success criteria before we start. If success criteria are unclear at hour 0, the clock does not start until they are. This is the single biggest cause of pilot drift we see.
Most teams measure too many things and then measure nothing. The 30-day measurement plan is short:
Five metrics, one dashboard, one Monday review. If the metric is not on the dashboard, it does not exist for the first 30 days.
After 30 days you can add CSAT, conversion-to-revenue, and channel attribution. Adding them earlier just adds noise.
The fastest way to know if any of this applies is a 20-minute call. Bring your numbers and we will do the math live. If you would rather poke around first, our tools page has a half-dozen free calculators that take five minutes each.
No newsletter funnel, no pitch deck. Just the math.