Case study · Legal services

Chen & Associates launches a precedent-aware legal assistant with Vertex AI

Impact

63% reduction in research hours per case

Timeline

10-week rollout across two practice groups

Stack

Google Vertex AI, LangChain, Elastic Enterprise Search

“With finetuned we consolidated millions of documents and delivered guidance to our attorneys in seconds. Their governance-first approach helped secure partner buy-in without slowing the schedule.”
— Maya Chen, Managing Partner

Challenge

Attorneys were spending hours navigating precedent, compliance notes, and intake briefs scattered across SharePoint and legacy matter-management tools. Leadership wanted a copilot that surfaced authoritative responses while respecting confidentiality walls between practice groups.

Solution

Document ingestion pipelines normalised over 2.3M PDFs with retention-aware embeddings and privilege labels.
Custom retrieval chain layering Vertex AI Search with firm-specific heuristics for citations and conflicts.
Role-based experience inside the existing case workspace with attorney and paralegal permission sets.

Outcomes

+37% billable utilisation

Recovered research hours moved to client work.

Zero data breaches

Audit logs aligned with regulatory reviews and client audits.

90% adoption

Attorneys rely on the assistant daily for drafting memos and checklists.

Implementation timeline

Week 1-2: Discovery workshops, data access approvals, and security architecture sign-off.
Week 3-5: Document ingestion, embedding optimisation, and evaluation harness build-out.
Week 6-7: Interface prototyping, guardrail tuning, and smoke tests with early adopters.
Week 8-10: Firm-wide enablement, success metrics instrumentation, and support handoff.

Exploring a similar initiative? We can repurpose this architecture for your governance model and tech stack.

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