The AI audit: four questions for every process in your firm
Most firms that ask about AI are asking the wrong question first. “Which tool should we buy?” comes before “which work should we stop doing by hand?” The audit exists to answer the second question, in writing, before anyone spends money on the first.
What the audit is
The AI audit is a short engagement with one output: a ranked, priced plan of what in your office should be automated, what should be left alone, and in what order.
It follows one week of normal work at the firm. During that week we sit with the people who actually do the work: the receptionist, the paralegal, the bookkeeper, the account manager. Not the partners, at least not at first. Partners know what the firm sells. The staff know where the time goes.
Every recurring process gets mapped. For each one we record who owns it, which tools it touches, how many hours a week it takes, where it stalls, and what breaks when that person is out sick or on holiday. Intake, conflict checks, engagement letters, billing runs, filing deadlines, document requests, client updates. The list is usually longer than anyone expected.
Then each process is run through the same four questions, in order:
- Does this need to happen at all?
- If yes, does a person need to do it?
- If not, can ordinary software do it?
- If not, can AI do it reliably, with a person checking the parts that matter?
The order matters. Most processes fail at question one or two. A monthly report nobody reads. A form that is filled in twice because two systems do not talk to each other. A status email that could be a shared folder. None of that needs AI. It needs to be dropped, or handed to a calendar rule, or fixed in the practice management system you already pay for.
What survives to question four is the real candidate list. Those are the processes where the work is genuinely judgment-shaped but repetitive enough that a model can do the first pass and a person can check the result.
The candidates are ranked by return: hours recovered per week, errors avoided, and revenue that stops leaking. A conflict check that takes two days to come back is a lead that goes elsewhere. An engagement letter that sits unsigned for a week is a matter that has not started billing. Those numbers go into the ranking next to the hours.
Does a firm your size need it
If the firm has one person doing everything, probably not yet. Map your own processes on a sheet of paper and run the four questions yourself. The framework is not secret.
The audit pays for itself once there are enough people that nobody holds the whole picture. That usually happens somewhere around the point where a partner no longer knows exactly how a new matter gets opened, or an office manager is the only person who knows why a particular spreadsheet exists. At that size, processes have grown around individuals, and the cost of each one is invisible because it is spread across several desks.
There is a second signal: someone in the office is already using AI tools on their own, without a policy, on client material. That is a sign the demand is real. It is also a sign the firm needs to decide, deliberately, where these tools belong and where they do not.
The audit is not a good fit if the firm wants a general technology strategy or a software selection exercise. It is narrow on purpose. It looks at recurring work and decides what to do about it.
What it costs
The audit is a fixed fee of $1,500 USD.
That covers the working sessions, the process map, the ranked list and the phased plan. Each phase in the plan carries its own fixed price, so the firm sees the cost of every step before committing to any of it. There is no estimate that grows later.
If the firm goes ahead with a build, the audit fee is credited against the first phase. If the firm decides to stop after the audit, it keeps everything. The documents belong to the client. A firm can take the plan to another provider, or hand it to an in-house person, or sit on it for a year. That is fine.
One more cost worth naming: staff time. The sessions take a few hours from the people being interviewed, spread across the week. Their time is the most valuable input to the audit, and the firm should plan for it rather than squeezing the sessions between calls.
What the first week looks like
Before the week starts, the firm sends a short list: who does what, which systems are in use, and any process that is already known to be painful. That takes an office manager about half an hour.
Day one is a kickoff with whoever runs the office day to day. We agree on which roles to sit with and when. Nothing is installed. No access to client files is needed at this stage.
Over the next few days, the working sessions happen. Each one is a conversation at the person’s desk, watching how a matter actually moves. Where do you copy this from? What happens when the client does not reply? Who checks this before it goes out? The point is to see the process as it is, not as the procedures manual says it should be.
By the end of the week, the process map is drafted. It is reviewed with the same staff who described the work, so the map reflects reality and not our interpretation of it. Corrections get made then, not after the plan is written.
The ranked list and the phased plan follow shortly after. They are walked through with the partners in one session, with the prices attached.
Adoption is written into every phase of every plan. The people who do the work test what gets built. Nothing goes live until they trust it. That rule is not a courtesy. Systems that staff route around are worse than no system, and the audit is where that expectation is set.
If the firm is ready to see what a ranked plan looks like for its own processes, the audit page has the details and the booking form: /audit.