You draft, review, call clients back and do the billing yourself — and the billable hours show it.
You chase intake forms, retainers and signatures by email and keep deadlines in three calendars.
You copy last month’s document, replace the names and dates by hand and hope nothing was missed.
Estate planning, family law, immigration, personal injury, real estate closings and corporate formation.
Numbers from Clio’s Legal Trends benchmarks and a drafting-time study — most of the gap between a busy day and a billable one is administration.
Lawyer utilization rate — about three billable hours in an eight-hour day. The rest goes to intake, paperwork and chasing.
Clio Legal Trends, 2025 ↗to assemble an estate planning package by hand, against about 45 minutes with document automation; divorce papers take five hours against 30–45 minutes.
of law firms answered an email enquiry from a prospective client, and only 40% answered the phone. Most new business never hears back.
Clio Legal Trends 2024, via LawNext ↗of billable hourly tasks could potentially be automated with AI; for legal secretaries and assistants the figure is 81%.
Clio, via LawNext ↗realization rate and 93% collection rate — of three billable hours, about 2.6 are invoiced and 2.4 are paid.
Clio Legal Trends, 2025 ↗of lawyers use AI widely, although 79% use it in some form — adoption mostly stops at a chat window.
Clio 2024, via LawNext ↗Put your monthly volume into the calculator and see hours and dollars.
Legal document automation replaces the way most firms still produce routine documents — open last month’s file, replace the names, dates and terms by hand, read it twice, hope nothing slipped — with templates that assemble the document from intake data. The same approach covers the steps around the document: answering the enquiry, running the conflict check, sending the engagement letter for signature, filing what the client sends back, calendaring deadlines and drafting the invoice. In a small firm most of that time is not legal judgement. It is administration that keeps lawyers at 38% utilization.
Wireclad builds law firm automation as custom workflows around the tools you already use — Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, Word, DocuSign, QuickBooks — rather than a new platform to migrate to. Workflows in n8n connect those systems through their APIs; a language model reads intake forms, classifies incoming scans and drafts status updates; conditional templates turn your Word precedents into automated legal document assembly. Everything a client will see is reviewed by a lawyer first.
Enquiries get an answer in minutes instead of days. A routine document set takes minutes of paralegal time instead of hours. Deadlines come from rules rather than memory, time entries are drafted from the day’s activity, and invoices go out with reminders attached. Lawyers keep every decision — conflicts, strategy, signatures — and lose the retyping.
The run path of a typical matter. Each enquiry travels it on its own; every document and every deadline is confirmed by a lawyer before it leaves the firm.
Website form, phone system or the intake inbox — every enquiry starts its own run with the caller’s details and matter type.
Sends an answer within minutes with a Calendly link and creates the lead in Clio Grow or Lawmatics, so nobody waits for a call-back.
A language model turns the questionnaire and the first emails into structured fields: parties, dates, jurisdiction, matter type.
Fuzzy-matches every party name against clients and opposing parties in your practice system and writes a short report.
Any match stops the run and goes to the responsible attorney for a decision. Clean matters move on.
Fills your Word or Google Docs template, sends it through DocuSign or Dropbox Sign; after signing, a retainer request goes out via LawPay.
Conditional templates — Gavel, HotDocs, docassemble or docx — build wills, POAs, divorce forms or formation documents from the intake data.
Where the template has no clause, the model drafts one from the firm’s own precedents and marks it for review. Nothing goes out unread.
OCR plus classification: scans and attachments are named, dated and filed in the matter in Clio, NetDocuments or SharePoint.
Dates from the documents go through jurisdiction rules into calendar events and tasks for the attorney and paralegal to confirm.
When a matter changes stage, the model drafts a personalised email or SMS; the paralegal reads it and sends it.
Every day, activity in email and calendar becomes draft time entries per matter. The lawyer confirms or edits them.
Approved entries become the invoice in Clio or QuickBooks; unpaid invoices get polite reminders on a schedule you set.
Typical minutes per matter in a small firm handling routine work. Your own numbers go into the calculator below.
Based on 4 h 20 min by hand and 35 min with the flow per item, from the table above.
The flow answers, checks, assembles and reminds. Lawyers keep every judgement and every signature.
Opinions, case strategy and client consultations are never generated.
A lawyer reviews and signs off each document before it leaves the firm, automated or not.
The flow finds the match; the attorney decides whether to take the matter.
Calculated by rules, confirmed by a lawyer — the calendar entry is a proposal, not a verdict.
Opposing counsel and the courtroom stay with people.
Drafted from activity, approved by the lawyer before the client sees them.
Flip a switch to hand a step to the flow or take it back.
Benchmarks from Clio’s Legal Trends, Gavel’s drafting study and Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals report: routine documents in minutes rather than hours, and more of the day billed.
We map the process as it runs today, count the minutes and agree what the flow must never do on its own.
A working flow on your real data, in a sandbox. You see every run and every exception.
Edge cases, approvals and alerts, then the switch-over — with the old way kept as a fallback.
Monitoring, fixes when a vendor changes a format, and a monthly report of hours saved.
The workflow runs on your own server or cloud account, and the language model can run locally so client files never leave your network. Every step is logged, and a lawyer reviews everything the model drafts — which is what the competence and supervision rules ask for.
Yes. The flow reads and writes matters, contacts, documents and time entries through their APIs, and NetDocuments, iManage and Microsoft 365 are supported too. Your practice system stays the system of record.
That is usually the starting point. Your templates get fields and conditional logic, and the intake questionnaire fills them. Clauses the template does not cover are drafted by the model and marked for review.
The flow answers the enquiry, books the consultation and runs a fuzzy name match against your client base. Any possible conflict stops the run and goes to the responsible attorney — the decision to take a matter is never automated.
The lawyer who signs it, as today. That is why every automated legal document is reviewed before it leaves the firm, the assembly rules are tested on your past matters, and each run keeps the source data next to the output.
It cuts the unbilled hours: intake, retyping, filing and chasing. Clio’s benchmarks put lawyer utilization at 38%, so the time won back is billable work or flat-fee matters with better margins.
A few hours: one session to walk through the current process, one to review the first assembled documents and a short check before go-live. We work from your existing templates and systems.
Describe it in two sentences — we reply within a day with a workflow sketch.
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