A regional professional-services firm cuts intake from days to minutes.
Pacific Northwest professional-services firm. Mid-size practice with strict data-residency requirements and high client trust obligations. Deployed on Private Edge.
The pain
The firm's intake process required senior attention at every new matter — a paralegal pulled the form, a managing attorney ran conflicts, somebody drafted the engagement letter, and the acknowledgment took a day or two. Meanwhile, prospective clients were shopping; the firm was losing matters before the first call.
Drafting workflows had a similar shape. Motions and standard filings followed firm templates and prior matter context, but every draft started from scratch in a senior attorney's keyboard. The high-leverage senior time was being spent on the parts of drafting that templated cleanly.
What we built
An on-prem appliance running a custom workflow set on the Private Edge tier. Workflows include matter intake with conflict checks, motion drafting against the firm's templates and prior cases, client communications with attorney approval, and invoice drafting tied to the practice management system.
The privacy boundary is at the firm. Documents stay on the appliance. RAG retrieval runs locally — only the chunks relevant to a query reach a cloud LLM. The control plane sees workflow audit metadata for ops visibility, never raw client content.
Outcome
- New-matter intake moved from a 1–3 day cycle to under 30 minutes elapsed time, with the attorney's review consistently as the only manual step before send.
- Drafting workflows produce first-pass outputs that the senior attorneys revise rather than write — a structurally different use of senior time.
- Audit and budget governance ship by default. Every workflow step is logged before and after; every LLM call is captured with firm, agent, model, tokens, and timestamp. No silent overspend has occurred.
- Self-healing recovery has avoided onsite intervention; remote management over outbound mTLS handles updates, restarts, and patches.
Quote available with customer consent. Anonymized at the customer's request until we publish a named case study.
Why this matters beyond legal
The pattern shape — high-trust intake plus high-effort drafting plus a strict data-residency boundary — generalizes to most regulated trades, professional services, finance, and healthcare-adjacent operations. The same workflow structure runs in Forge when the data can live in NWA-managed cloud, and in Private Edge when it can't.
Browse all workflow categories for concrete shapes that map to your operation.