Context
A multi-state professional services business with annual revenue in the mid-eight figures. Most of the company’s legal exposure ran through routine recurring instruments — MSAs and SOWs with clients, NDAs with prospects and partners, vendor agreements, employment paperwork, and the occasional negotiated contract for a larger deal.
Every one of those documents had been going to outside counsel for drafting, review, or redlining. The result was a six-figure annual outside-counsel bill, weeks of turnaround on routine work, and a chronic bottleneck whenever the business needed to move quickly.
The challenge
The problem wasn’t the existence of outside counsel. The problem was that outside counsel was being asked to do work that didn’t actually require a lawyer:
- Producing the seventh MSA of the quarter that differed from the previous six in exactly the parties and the fee schedule.
- Redlining a vendor’s NDA against a known internal standard the firm had already settled on.
- Drafting an employment offer letter from a template the firm had used dozens of times.
Each of these tasks took outside counsel hours of billable time. Each was substantively the same exercise the firm had run before. None required the partner-level judgment the firm was paying for.
The leadership team knew where the spend was going. What they didn’t have was an alternative that wasn’t “hire an in-house general counsel” — which would have cost more than the outside-counsel bill it replaced.
The approach
We built an in-house general counsel agent. The objective was not to replace outside counsel for novel matters, litigation, or partner-level strategic advice. The objective was to absorb the recurring, template-driven, judgment-light work that was driving 90% of the outside-counsel bill.
Three pieces had to come together:
A codified template library. We worked with the leadership team to codify every recurring contract type the business produced — MSAs, NDAs, SOWs, vendor agreements, employment paperwork, contractor agreements, mutual NDAs. For each type, we captured the firm’s standard form, the negotiable fields, the non-negotiable terms, and the fallback positions.
A negotiation playbook. Beyond just drafting, the agent needed to negotiate. We codified the firm’s positions on indemnification caps, IP assignment, payment terms, termination clauses, jurisdiction, and a dozen other recurring negotiation surfaces — including which positions were preferred, which were acceptable fallbacks, and which were walk-aways.
Routing, approval, and escalation. Not every matter is routine. The agent’s job is to handle what it can, escalate what it can’t, and never let a partner-level matter quietly land on a junior person’s desk. Approval flows route by document type, dollar amount, and counterparty risk profile.
Inside the system
The agent runs as a daemon process integrated into the firm’s Google Workspace and Slack environments. The workflow:
- A request comes in through Slack — typically a forwarded counterparty contract or a new agreement to draft.
- The agent identifies the document type, retrieves the relevant template and playbook, and produces a first-pass draft or redline within minutes.
- The output is delivered as a tracked-change document in Google Drive with a Slack thread summarizing the changes, the rationale, and any flagged items requiring human attention.
- Routine matters are approved by the requesting party. Higher-risk matters route to a designated human reviewer. Genuinely novel matters escalate to outside counsel — which still happens, just rarely.
Every action the agent takes is logged. Every human override is captured and folded back into the playbook so the system gets sharper over time.
What it didn’t replace
The firm still uses outside counsel — just dramatically less of it. Litigation, partner-level negotiation on the largest deals, regulatory matters, and anything genuinely novel still go to the outside firm. But those matters now make up the entire outside-counsel bill, rather than being buried under a pile of routine contract work that didn’t need to be there.