Every Legal Technology Vendor Says Their Product Is the Answer. We Tell You Which One Actually Is.

We have no commercial relationships, referral agreements, or commission structures with any legal technology vendor. Our revenue comes from our advisory fees, not vendor kickbacks. We have recommended Harvey AI to some firms and told others to avoid it. We have told firms to buy CoCounsel and told others that their existing tools were sufficient. Every recommendation is based solely on what is best for your firm's specific situation, budget, and needs.

Your IT department keeps systems running. A technology audit evaluates strategic direction. These are fundamentally different functions. Your IT team knows how to manage your email server and reset passwords. They are not positioned to evaluate whether Harvey AI or CoCounsel is the better fit for your practice areas, or whether your integration architecture is costing you $200K in hidden inefficiency. We work alongside your IT team, leveraging their institutional knowledge while providing the CTO-level strategic assessment they are not positioned to deliver.

We are practitioners, not slide deck consultants. Alastair has 21+ years of hands-on technology leadership across Fortune 500 companies and high-growth ventures. Our audits produce actionable architectures, not theoretical frameworks. You get a working roadmap with specific vendor recommendations, integration blueprints, and ROI projections your team can execute against. Not a 200-page report written by junior analysts that sits on a shelf collecting dust.

That is a win. If your existing systems can be optimized to meet your goals, we will tell you exactly that. We have told firms to cancel planned platform purchases and invest in configuration and training instead. Avoiding a $500K platform purchase you do not need is one of the most valuable outcomes of an audit. Our fee is independent of our recommendations, so we have zero incentive to recommend purchases you do not need.

Yes. Many firms engage us for the audit, then continue with an ongoing retainer for implementation oversight through our Enterprise tier. But we never make the audit contingent on implementation work. The audit stands on its own as a complete deliverable. If you want to take the roadmap and execute it with your own team or another partner, that works perfectly. The deliverables are designed to be actionable regardless of who implements them.

Your IT department is incentivized to report that everything is fine. They chose the current systems, they maintain the current systems, and they are evaluated on uptime, not strategic value. An independent audit evaluates technology against business outcomes: are your systems generating revenue, reducing risk, and enabling growth? We have audited firms where IT reported 99.9% uptime while the firm was losing $500K annually to manual processes that should have been automated 5 years ago. We also evaluate security posture against ABA standards, not just "is the firewall on." Every audit we have conducted has identified at least $200K in recoverable efficiency or risk reduction. Many find over $1M.

New leadership transitions are the ideal time for a technology audit because you have political capital and mandate for change. We start with a 2-week assessment: interview every practice group leader, review every technology contract, benchmark against peer firms, and produce a prioritized roadmap. The roadmap includes quick wins (90 days), medium-term improvements (6 months), and strategic investments (12-18 months) with ROI projections for each. The new managing partner gets a board-ready presentation showing the current technology gap and a credible path to close it. We have supported 8 managing partner transitions and every one resulted in a multi-year technology investment that the previous leadership had deferred.

AI readiness is not about buying tools. It is about data architecture, workflow design, and change management. Our AI readiness assessment evaluates 5 dimensions: (1) data quality and accessibility, because AI is useless if your documents are trapped in local drives and email; (2) workflow standardization, because AI cannot automate a process that is different for every attorney; (3) security and compliance posture, because ABA Model Rule 1.6 applies to AI outputs; (4) cultural readiness, because the best AI tool fails if attorneys refuse to use it; and (5) integration architecture, because standalone AI creates data silos. Most firms score 2 out of 5 on their first assessment. We build a remediation plan that gets them to 4 out of 5 within 6 months, at which point AI adoption becomes a competitive weapon instead of a science experiment.