01The client portalA client should not have to telephone a law office to obtain a copy of their own will. The portal holds every executed instrument, the current draft of anything in progress, correspondence and filings as they are received, statements of account, and the trust ledger for your matter. It is available at any hour, to you and to the advisers you authorise, and to nobody else. Access survives the closing of a matter: the record remains for as long as you are a client of this firm.
02Secure document exchangeEmail is a poor container for a trust instrument, a tax return or a medical record, and worse for the passwords people send after them. The portal accepts uploads directly, over an encrypted channel, into the file to which they belong. Nothing sensitive need pass through an inbox that is synchronised to a telephone, backed up by a third party, and searchable by anyone who later gains the credentials.
03Counsel by videoA great deal of this work is done well at a distance. A planning conversation, a review of drafts, a difficult family discussion in which the participants are in three states — these are frequently better by video than by an afternoon of travel. Signing ceremonies are the exception and are conducted in person, unless remote online notarisation is genuinely appropriate to the instrument, which is a judgment made document by document rather than as a policy.
04The matter registerEvery matter opened at this firm receives a number of the form year, client identifier, department, subarea, sequence — so that a file can be found, a conflict can be screened against the whole history of the practice, and a statement can be attributed to the work it describes. It is an unglamorous system and it is the reason nothing is mislaid. Clients see its effect rather than its mechanics: correspondence that references the right matter, and a lawyer who knows without looking what else the family has open.
05Structured document reviewIn a matter with a substantial document production, software assembles the chronology, compares successive drafts of an agreement, searches transcripts and checks citations against the reporter. In that register the technology is unambiguously good: it reads faster than any of us and does not tire on the two thousandth page. What it does not do is decide anything. Every proposition that survives into a paper has been read in the original by a lawyer.
06Artificial intelligence, used narrowlyClients have begun to ask, quite properly, whether their documents are being drafted by a machine. The answer is set out here so that nobody has to ask. These tools are used where they are a better version of something a law office has always done — assembling, comparing, searching, checking. They are not used to generate advice, to produce authority, or to decide. Client material is not submitted to any tool that trains on it or retains it, and where a matter is sensitive enough that the question would trouble the client, they are not used at all. If you wish to know precisely which technology touched your file, ask, and you will be told.
