AI workflow systems for small law firms
Standing Order Systems designs and installs AI workflow systems for small law firms: intake triage, deadline extraction, daily priority digests, and review panels modeled on your own work product. Built by a practicing litigator who runs her own docket on these systems every day, and installed on the tools your firm already pays for.
Book the Workflow Audit: $1,000
Calls are held on weekday afternoons, Central time. The audit starts with a 20-minute fit call.
A new matter arrives by phone, email, and a web form, and lands in three places. The deadlines from it live in one person’s head, or in a spreadsheet nobody else trusts. Your staff retypes the same facts into the same systems, matter after matter. Meanwhile the firm pays for AI seats (a legal AI platform, a team plan, a practice-management add-on) that get opened a few times a month, because nobody had the hours to set them up around the way your firm actually works.
None of that is a staffing problem. It is a systems problem, and it has a known fix: take the repeatable work (routing, extracting, drafting, checking) and build it once, properly, inside the tools you already have.
Step 1
$1,000 fixed, one week
A structured intake on your current tools and pain points, delivered as a written automation roadmap: what to build, in what order, and what each piece should change. If you stop here, you keep the roadmap.
Step 2
$4,000 to $7,500 fixed by scope
Three to five working systems, chosen from a proven menu:
Every build includes full documentation and one training call for your team. Half to start, half at delivery.
Step 3
$400 to $600 per month
Monitoring, fixes, small additions, and a monthly summary. Systems drift as your tools and caseload change; the plan keeps them accurate without another project. Optional, month-to-month, and most firms start it in month two.
Fit call Audit Build Delivery and training Care Plan from month two
The design comes first and does not belong to any one vendor. Implementation then runs on the stack your firm already has:
n8n automation pipelines, configured ChatGPT assistants, Claude projects. Scheduled, cross-system work lives here.
If your firm already runs a legal AI platform, the engagement is process design and configuration inside its modules: your intake mapped to its intake, your review standards built into its workflows.
One honest limit, stated before you pay for anything: inside a closed platform, the result is design plus configuration. It is powerful, and it is slightly less autonomous than an open agent stack, because the platform sets the ceiling. You will be told which track your firm is on, and what that ceiling is, in the roadmap, before any build is proposed.
Standing Order Systems is the consulting practice of a plaintiff’s-side employment litigator in St. Louis: the only associate at a three-lawyer firm, personally carrying about 45 active matters. The systems sold here are the systems she runs that caseload on, in daily production use: the morning brief she opens her day with, the intake triage that routes new matters, the review panels modeled on her own filed work.
They were originally built on one AI platform and later migrated across others, so portability is not a promise in a brochure. It is the history of the systems themselves.
No. Builds happen inside your firm’s own accounts, under your credentials, and the consultant never receives or holds your client files. Where a build needs sample material to learn from (a review panel modeled on your exemplars, for instance), it is reviewed inside your own systems or in redacted form, as agreed in writing before the build starts.
Yes, and it changes the shape of the engagement, not its value. With a legal AI platform already in place, the work is configuration and process design inside its modules: your intake mapped properly, your review standards built in, your reporting set up. Most firms use a fraction of what their platform does, because setup was nobody’s job. Making it your firm’s system is the job here.
You keep everything: the working systems, inside your accounts, and the full documentation. From there it is your choice. Many firms take the Care Plan ($400 to $600 per month, month-to-month) for monitoring, breakage fixes, and small changes. Others run the systems themselves with the documentation and call if they ever want a new build. Nothing renews automatically, and nothing stops working if we part ways.
The service is built for solo practices through firms of about ten lawyers. The audit exists precisely to answer the size question honestly: if your volume does not justify a build, the roadmap will say so, and you will have spent $1,000 to learn that in writing instead of $7,500 to learn it in practice.
The consultant practices law in Missouri and Illinois. Consulting for firms there would mix the two practices in ways that help nobody. Firms in those states are respectfully declined.
The audit is $1,000, fixed, and takes one week. You keep the roadmap either way: what to build, in what order, on the stack you already own.
Calls are held on weekday afternoons, Central time.