AI for law firms: what it costs, and where the line is.
Legal work is document work, which makes it one of the highest-leverage places to apply AI — and the professional obligations around confidentiality and supervision make it one of the places where the build quality matters most.
The first workflow is intake, not drafting
Most firms want to start with drafting because it is the most visible time sink. Start with intake instead. Client intake is high-volume, highly repetitive, and it is where firms leak revenue: enquiries that arrive after hours, conflict checks that take days, potential clients who call the next firm on the list because nobody called back.
An intake assistant that captures the matter, runs an initial conflict screen against your own records, and books the consultation is a contained build with a payback you can count in retained matters.
Where the professional line sits
Three constraints shape every legal AI build, and none of them are optional:
- Confidentiality. Client information cannot be used to train a shared model or leave a system you control. This is an architecture decision, not a setting.
- Supervision. The output is a draft prepared under a lawyer's supervision, always. Every artefact needs to arrive clearly labelled as such, with the reasoning attached so it can be checked rather than trusted.
- Citation integrity. Any assertion about authority must be traceable to a real source the reviewer can open. A system that cannot cite should not be allowed to assert.
What it costs
An intake or client-facing assistant for a small practice is a fixed-price build at $3,500, live in two to three weeks. Contract review and discovery work at firm scale is an agent engagement — scoped against your own clause library and prior decisions, benchmarked before it touches live matters, and priced as a sprint rather than a tool.
For reference, the market quotes custom AI chatbots at $20,000–$80,000, which is worth knowing when you read a legal-tech proposal with a legal-tech premium on top.
The question to ask any legal AI vendor
Ask where your documents go, who else's model sees them, and what happens to them if you cancel. If the answer takes more than two sentences or includes the phrase "industry-standard", keep asking until it does not.
AI intake or chat assistant for a firm — $3,500, fixed. Your documents stay in your environment, every output labelled as a draft for supervision. Every build ships in your cloud, under your accounts, with the repository in your name. See your price in three questions, grade us first with the AI Vendor Scorecard, or book a call with an Applied AI Scientist.