Waverley Legal Partners · Forth Copilot · Pilot to production in 9 weeks
4hr → 22min
CONTRACT REVIEW TIME
1,900
FEE-EARNER HOURS SAVED / QTR
−67%
SLA BREACHES
£184k
ANNUALISED CAPACITY UNLOCKED
THE CHALLENGE
- Fee-earners were spending 3–4 hours per NDA and supplier contract on manual clause extraction and risk flagging.
- Inbound contracts landed in a shared inbox with no triage — high-risk deals sat next to low-value renewals.
- Version control lived in email threads; partners routinely reviewed superseded drafts.
THE SOLUTION
- Document AI pipeline ingests every inbound contract, extracts parties, term, liability caps, IP clauses and governing law into a structured record.
- Workflow automation routes each contract by risk score to the right fee-earner, with SLA timers and partner escalation on high-value deals.
- A custom Copilot sits inside the case management system so fee-earners can ask 'what changed vs our template?' and get a clause-level diff, cited to the source PDF.
"We didn't cut headcount — we stopped drowning. The Copilot reads the contract before I do and tells me what actually matters. I get my Fridays back."
OPERATOR QUESTIONS
How this actually works day to day
Does the Document AI make legal judgements?+
No. It extracts and compares — parties, term, liability caps, IP and governing law — and flags deviations from the firm's template. The fee-earner makes every judgement call, working from a shorter, better-organised starting point.
How are the extractions verified?+
Every extracted clause is cited back to the exact page and paragraph in the source PDF, so a reviewer can confirm the position in seconds rather than re-reading the document.
Where does client-confidential data go?+
Contracts stay inside the firm's tenancy with per-matter access controls and full audit logging. Nothing is used to train external models.
Did the firm reduce headcount?+
No. The 1,900 hours a quarter were redeployed into billable advisory work — the practical result was around £184k of annualised capacity, not redundancies.
How are high-risk contracts prioritised?+
Each contract gets a risk score on ingestion and is routed accordingly, with SLA timers and automatic partner escalation on high-value deals so nothing sits unseen in a shared inbox.
MORE CASE STUDIES
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OWNER-DRIVER FLEET // Forfar, Angus
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An Angus-based owner-driver operation joined the GoMuc supply network to fill empty backloads, lifting weekly utilisation by more than a third.