The work your firm repeats every week, prepared for review

Intake, conflict and eligibility checks, proposals, document chasing, matter state, recurring client updates. I build workflows for law, CPA, engineering, and consulting firms that get that work ready and then stop. A person at the firm approves anything a client sees, and nothing I build gives professional advice.

Start the written assessment

Where the hours go before anyone opens a matter

Law, CPA, engineering, and consulting firms run the same shape of work between the billable parts. It arrives by email, it lives in three systems, and it lands on whoever knows the rules, which is usually the most expensive person available.

Recurring firm workWhere a workflow fits
Intake

The form, the referral email, the notes from the call. Somebody rekeys the same details into the practice system, chases the two fields nobody filled in, and opens the matter.

Conflict and eligibility checks

A name goes against the client list, then against related parties, then against the last several years of matters. Running the search is mechanical. Clearing it is not.

Proposals and engagement letters

The same document rebuilt from the last one, with the scope and fee paragraphs swapped and the rest re-read to make sure nothing from the previous client survived the copy.

Documents in and out

Requesting them, tracking what arrived, naming and filing them, and finding out on Thursday that one is still missing.

Matter state

Status lives in the practice system, in a thread, and in one partner's head. The next owner hears about a change when they ask.

Recurring client updates

The weekly or monthly note saying where things stand. Quick to write, easy to skip, and the first thing a client notices when it stops arriving.

These workflows don't give professional advice

Nothing I build practices law, accounting, tax, or engineering. It doesn't render an opinion, take a filing position, clear a conflict, decide eligibility, sign off on a design, or judge the merits of a matter. It reads the record, checks it against rules your firm wrote down, prepares a draft, and stops. If a step needs judgment only a qualified person can give, the workflow stops there and hands that person the context it gathered.

What the system never doesThe hard line
Advice

No legal, tax, accounting, or engineering advice reaches a client, in a draft or anywhere else. A draft assembles language the firm has already approved. Scope, fee, and position paragraphs get written by the person who owns them rather than edited out of a draft.

Clearance

The system runs the conflict search and shows the matches returned by the agreed searches, with their sources and any missing coverage. A person reviews and clears potential conflicts. A clean search result is not a clearance.

Merits and positions

Whether to take the matter, what position to file, what an opinion says, whether a design meets code. None of that belongs in a written rule a workflow follows.

Sends

A person approves every client-facing message before it leaves. There is no condition under which the system sends on its own.

What the system does doPreparation only
Reads

Pulls the request, the attachments, and the existing records, and puts the relevant facts in one place with a pointer back to where each one came from.

Checks

Runs the searches and validations your firm defined, and shows its work instead of returning a verdict.

Drafts

Writes the reply, the missing-information request, the status update, and the record change, and holds all of them in a queue.

Records

Writes down who approved what, when, and what they changed before approving it. Responsibility stays where it already was.

Client records, and what a model actually sees

Firm records can contain confidential, privileged, or regulated information. Before anything moves, we write down which parts of it can go near a model and which parts can't.

The default is the narrowest useful slice. A workflow step gets the fields that step needs and nothing else. A conflict search needs party names and related entities. It doesn't need the engagement narrative. An intake completeness check needs to know a field is empty. It doesn't need the contents of the other twenty. Whole matter files don't get uploaded so a model can have context.

Where the step still needs a record that carries identifying detail, the detail comes out first. Names, account and file numbers, health and financial specifics, and privileged narrative get redacted or replaced with a token that the workflow can map back on your side, after the model is done.

Handling, in specificsSame controls as every engagement
Where it lives

Your practice system stays the system of record. The workflow reads from it and writes back to it. It doesn't become a second copy of the firm's files somewhere you can't see.

Who can reach it

Least-privilege access protected with MFA, encryption in transit and at rest, and your data kept separate from any other client's.

Third parties

The model providers and automation platforms a workflow depends on are named in the engagement scope, under business terms that don't train on your data.

Deletion

Working data is deleted on request, and by default within 30 days of an engagement closing.

Categories that stay out

If a category of record can't leave your tenancy at all, tell me before we start and I keep it out of AI processing. I don't claim certifications this practice doesn't hold.

The full list is on the data handling page.

What the firm owns

A workflow follows rules somebody wrote. Writing them, approving against them, and keeping them current is the firm's job, and it doesn't end at handoff.

Decided before the buildYour rules
Definitions

What counts as a conflict, what a complete intake looks like, which matter states exist and what each one means, which client updates go out and on what trigger.

Approvers

Name one approver and a backup for each review step.

Boundaries

Which records can be processed, which can't, and which client or matter categories sit outside the workflow entirely.

Maintained after handoffYour system
Rule changes

When your policy, your jurisdiction, or your fee structure changes, somebody updates the rules. The workflow follows what's written down, not what changed in a partners' meeting.

Access

The accounts, seats, and systems of record stay yours, and one person owns them.

Rejections

Read what your approvers keep editing and killing. A fix you make every week belongs in the rules.

An illustrative new-matter intake

Everything below is illustrative. I wrote it to show the shape of the work, not to describe a particular engagement. Work I’ve built is on the work page.

A referral email lands on a Tuesday night. It names a prospective client, the other side, and a deadline. By the time somebody opens it in the morning, the parties have been pulled out into the intake record, the conflict search has run and its hits are listed with the source of each one, three required fields are flagged empty, a request for those three fields is drafted to the referring attorney, and the whole thing is sitting in a review queue. Nobody has been told the firm will take the matter.

A partner reads the conflict hits, clears them or declines the matter, edits the request for the missing fields, and approves it. That approval is what sends the email and opens the matter. The record afterward holds the original referral, each check and what it looked at, the draft as generated and as sent, and who approved it.

See a separate general intake example and checklist in the client intake guide.

Where this connects

Two workflows in the catalog carry most of the firm work above. The Lead Response & Qualification Engine handles the inbound side: new requests, missing information, routing, and the first approved reply. The Workflow Router & Case-State Orchestrator handles matters that stay open for months, where state, ownership, and the next action have to agree with each other.

Services & pricing has what each way of working costs and what makes a scope grow. If you'd rather start by describing the problem, the free written assessment takes one process and comes back in writing.

Tell me which part of the firm's work keeps getting stuck.

Describe one process. I'll reply in writing with where the approval gate belongs and what I'd build first.

Start the written assessment