AI-assisted document intelligence for a Wellington law firm

The firm's junior lawyers and paralegals were spending a disproportionate share of billable time on two repetitive tasks: first-pass contract review for standard commercial agreements, and discovery document triage ahead of litigation and due diligence matters. Partners were seeing junior staff burn hours on document sorting rather than legal reasoning, and matters with large discovery sets were routinely blowing past internal turnaround targets. The firm had looked at legal-tech software on its own but found that off-the-shelf tools still needed a trained human layer to catch context the software missed, which is what led it to a managed service rather than a licence purchase.

The engagement began with four document reviewers and one QA lead, all with paralegal-level training and experience on comparable common-law document sets. As the firm brought more matters into the service, particularly ahead of a large due diligence deadline in its second quarter, the team grew to eight reviewers and two QA leads, with a project manager coordinating matter intake from Wellington. The Manila team flagged contract clauses, extracted key dates and obligations, and triaged discovery documents into responsive, non-responsive and privileged categories, with every batch passed back to the firm's own lawyers for final sign-off before anything is relied on in a matter.

Offshore delivery from Manila, Philippines, a document review and data extraction team working under the firm's direct supervision.

Client and case data is central to how this engagement was structured. Under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020, IPP12 governs disclosure of personal information overseas, but data sent purely for processing on the firm's behalf, where the offshore team does not use it for its own purposes, falls under the service-provider exception rather than being treated as a disclosure at all. The firm still required a written data handling agreement, access restricted to matter-specific document sets, and no local storage of client files outside the firm's own systems. The firm remained the client-facing party and retained ultimate responsibility for every document that left its systems, with the Manila team's QA lead and the firm's supervising partner both sighting a sample of each batch before it was treated as final.

Average turnaround for first-pass review of a standard commercial contract fell from around five business days to under eight hours. On a mid-sized discovery matter, document triage that would previously have taken two junior lawyers roughly three weeks was completed in nine working days. The firm calculated its cost per document reviewed fell by approximately 42 percent compared to using its own fee-earners for the same volume of first-pass work, freeing an estimated 500 junior lawyer hours over the engagement's first year for higher-value client work.

Nothing left the firm's supervision. Every batch went back through the firm's own lawyers before it counted as final, which is what let partners trust a service handling client documents in the first place.