SNAPP.FASTYour files and your client emails grow faster than your fee-earner hours. You can hire, you can refuse work, or you can make each hour do more. An established Paris litigation firm chose the third option. For five months, its lawyers gave daily work to an AI assistant that SNAPP.FAST connected to the firm's email and documents.
The managing partner is clear about the result: without these tools, she could not handle her current number of files and clients. She will confirm it herself: ask us for a reference call.
This article tells you what the assistant did, what went wrong, and how to test the same approach in your firm before you pay for it.
The result
The firm now handles about twice as many clients with the same team, and it has capacity for 3.5 times as many. Most proceedings are now in writing, and almost all of the team's time is office work of the type in the table below. That work is now 3.5 times faster. So twice the clients take less office time than before: about 57% of the former office hours.
Time per task, before and after:
| Task | Manual | With the assistant |
|---|---|---|
| Reply to a client who sent several emails | 36 min | 15 min |
| First assessment of a new document pack | 3 h | 45 min |
| First-pass triage of a 400-document file (about 1,000 pages) | 25 h | 3 h |
| Substantive draft or revision | 4 h | 1 h 45 |
| Evidence bundle, assembled and checked | 90 min | 30 min |
| Matter status, rebuilt from emails and documents | 36 min | 12 min |
The largest gain is in document triage: about 8 times less lawyer time. A file of 400 separate documents is not one long read. A person must open each document, find what it is, its date and parties, decide where it fits and log it. Most of the time goes into these context changes, not into reading. The assistant opens and classifies all the documents. The lawyer then reviews an index and the documents it flags: duplicates, gaps and key documents. The first pass is ready the same afternoon, not at the end of the week. The larger the file, the larger the gain.
These figures come from a model of the firm's week, built with the managing partner, from the work the assistant did. The "with the assistant" times include the lawyer's review and corrections. Machine time is not counted as time saved. Court hearings are not included.
How the lawyers use it
A lawyer sends a short instruction by message or voice note: "reply to the client's last emails", "attach the certificate of service", "put the client's comments into the statement of case".
The assistant identifies the matter, finds the emails and attachments, and prepares the work in the tool the lawyer already uses: a draft in the correct email thread, or a Word document with tracked changes. It sends nothing. The lawyer reads, edits and decides.
Voice notes are the part she uses most. Between two appointments, thirty seconds of voice replaces a page of typed instructions.
This is the workflow:
- Instruction from the lawyer.
- Identify the correct matter. If two matters are possible, stop and ask.
- Retrieve only the authorised sources.
- Prepare the draft and attach the documents.
- Check the attachments and list what is missing.
- Lawyer review.
- Send or file only after the lawyer approves.
- Keep an audit record.
Four things it did
Several emails, one reply. A client sent several emails with different questions. The assistant read the full thread and prepared one draft reply that answered each question or marked it as open. The lawyer did not have to rebuild the conversation.
A missing document, flagged. A lawyer asked for an internal update with the certificate of service attached. The only attachment in the correspondence was an invoice. The assistant did not attach the invoice to make the file look complete. It flagged the missing certificate of service and prepared a request for it.
Client comments, made visible. A client sent comments on a statement of case. The assistant made the relevant changes in the Word document with tracked changes, explained the comments it did not apply, and attached the revised version to an internal draft for the lawyer.
The original agreement, unchanged. A lawyer needed the client's original fee agreement in a draft. The assistant found it in the mailbox, attached it, and checked that the attached file was identical to the original.
Three things that went wrong, and what changed
An assistant that never makes a mistake does not exist. What matters is that each mistake becomes a control.
Wrong matter. In some responses, the assistant used facts from a different matter. Now each task is bound to one matter, and the assistant stops when the client or matter name is ambiguous. It does not guess.
An unchecked bundle index. One exhibit list referred to documents that nobody had compared with the originals. Now each item in a bundle index must exist and match its source. A missing document stays visible as missing. It never gets a number.
A fee read from the wrong clause. When it extracted a fee, the assistant once took an indemnity ceiling as the fee. Now amounts are classified before they are used, and an ambiguous amount goes to the lawyer.
These controls are part of what SNAPP.FAST delivers. They are not extra options.
What the lawyer always keeps
Legal judgment, advice, strategy and price. Every send, every filing, every change to a sensitive record. The assistant prepares the work. The lawyer decides.
Before any connection, the firm agrees which data the assistant can read, which providers process it, where, and for how long. Client emails and documents are treated as evidence, never as instructions to the assistant. This is the posture you need for UK GDPR and the SRA, and for the UAE, DIFC and ADGM data protection rules.
How to test it in your firm
Do not trust AI in general. Test one specific task.
- Choose three tasks your team does every week, for example client replies, bundles and status updates.
- Measure how long they take now, including searching and checking.
- Run the same tasks with the assistant on approved or synthetic files. Include difficult cases: a missing attachment, two clients with similar names, a scanned document.
- Measure the lawyer's review and correction time, not only the speed of the draft.
- Keep the task only if the total time is clearly lower and the quality is the same.
If the assisted task takes as much effort as doing it yourself, it has not earned a place in your practice. At this firm, it did.
Want to run this test on one of your workflows? Request a quote and we will reply with a fixed scope.