MCR.AE

Review · Four weeks

Your people already use AI on client work. Nobody has written down how.

That question can be answered in a month. It opens a larger one: who owns how the firm wins work. The Review answers both, in writing, with evidence, and ends in a recommendation. It may be that you need nothing else.

Start with the Review

This is for you if

You know these. You cannot yet prove them.

  • A junior drafted a pitch with an AI tool last week. You do not know which tool, what went in, or whether the client's material did.
  • New work arrives through three or four partners and lands wherever there is capacity. When one of them is in a trial, it lands nowhere.
  • The firm pays for a CRM, a mailing tool and a website nobody has looked at in two years. No partner could say what any of it is for.
  • A client’s general counsel sent an AI-use questionnaire. It sat for a week because nobody knew whose it was.
  • Every client’s accounts go out on time. Nobody has ever asked them what else they need. When busy season ends, the pipeline is whatever walked in.

What you leave with

A written account, not a deck.

What was looked at. What was found. What follows.

  • How work arrives, traced

    Every source of new work in the last two years, mapped to the partner or process that produced it. Leaks marked. Nothing anonymised.

  • The exposure register

    What your fee earners and staff are doing with AI on client work, against confidentiality, personal data and your profession’s publicity rules. Each item with a severity and an owner.

  • The recommendation

    One of three: build the function, change one thing, or leave it alone. With what each costs in partner time, not just fees.

What changes

You know who brings the work in and what happens to it when they are busy. You know what your people are doing with AI on client work, and what it exposes you to. You know whether to build anything, and what it would cost in partner time.

The shape, week by week

Stages 1 and 2 of the method. Then you decide.

Sized so one partner can approve it. The first thing most firms buy. The only thing some need.

  1. Week 1

    Foundation

    • Confidentiality terms in the engagement letter, signed before I see anything.
    • Who decides, who delivers, who pays. Which partners need to be in the room.
    • What the firm already holds: the referral list, the client data, the systems, the policies, if any.
    • Interviews with the partners who bring in work and the people who support them.

  2. Weeks 2 to 3

    Discovery

    • How work arrives: every source traced to a name, or to nobody.
    • Where referrals leak: what happens to a warm introduction when the partner it landed with is in a trial.
    • What the systems cost, in fees and hours, against what they are used for.
    • What your people are doing with AI in pitches, client communication and marketing, and what it exposes the firm to.

  3. Week 4

    You decide

    • A written account the management committee can read in an hour.
    • A recommendation: build the function, change one thing, or leave it alone.
    • If the answer is leave it alone, that is the answer.

Where it does not fit

Three cases I will turn down.

  • Fewer than six fee earners. Nothing to design yet; the partners are the function. Rainmaking, or a conversation.
  • You have a marketing director. Then the question is their mandate. That is the Quarterly, with them in the room.
  • You want campaigns run. That is execution. I do not do it and the grant does not fund it. An agency, and I will name one.

Read first, decide later

The thinking behind this offer.

Long-form essays. No sign-up, no email capture. Read it before you book the call.

Four weeks. A written answer. Possibly the only one you need.

Tell me how work arrives at your firm. If the Review is the wrong shape, I will say so.

Start with the Review