How a Wellington Law Firm Saved 23 Hours Per Week with AI

When Morrison & Associates, a mid-sized law firm in Wellington with 28 staff, first approached us about AI, they were sceptical. They had heard the hype, sat through a vendor demo or two, and walked away unconvinced. Their concern was simple: "We deal in nuance. AI deals in patterns. How does that work for law?"

The answer, it turned out, was remarkably well. After a two-week AI Readiness Assessment, we identified three high-impact areas where AI could be deployed without compromising the firm's standards: document review and classification, contract clause extraction, and client intake questionnaire processing. None of these required replacing human judgement. All of them involved repetitive, time-consuming tasks that were pulling qualified lawyers away from billable work.

The implementation was phased over eight weeks. We started with document classification, training a model on five years of the firm's case files to automatically categorise and route incoming documents. The second phase tackled contract analysis, deploying a tool that could extract and flag key clauses, obligations, and deadlines across standard commercial agreements. The final phase automated the client intake process, converting paper-heavy questionnaires into a digital workflow that pre-populated matter files and flagged potential conflicts.

The results exceeded the firm's projections. Within the first month of full deployment, the team reported saving 23 hours per week across the practice. That time was redistributed to client-facing work, resulting in a 12% increase in billable hours without adding a single team member. Document classification accuracy reached 94%, with human review only required for edge cases. The total investment, net of MBIE co-funding, was recovered within four months.