Legal Document Automation for a City Firm

Key Results

• Standard document production time reduced by 70%
• 8 to 10 hours recovered per week across the practice
• 6 conflicting NDA templates reduced to one agreed firm standard

The Challenge: Drafting Without Legal Document Automation

A 38-lawyer commercial practice in the City had a document production problem that no legal document automation had ever touched, and that the partners had long since stopped noticing because it had always been there.

Senior associates drafted every standard document by hand — NDAs, board resolutions, straightforward commercial agreements, routine shareholder consents. Each one swallowed between 45 and 90 minutes, depending on complexity and on who picked it up. Across the practice, that came to 30 to 40 documents per week.

Whenever anyone actually did the maths, the answer was uncomfortable. At a billing rate of £350 per hour, the firm was burning £15,000 to £25,000 a week of senior associate time on work that was, by definition, routine.

Meanwhile, a second problem bit harder at fee-earner level. Over several years of lateral hires and partner preferences, the firm had accumulated six different versions of its NDA template. Which one counted as current depended entirely on who you asked. As a result, junior lawyers regularly produced NDAs from outdated precedents, and partners corrected the same errors again and again without ever touching the cause.

The Approach: Rationalise the Templates, Then Automate

Severus opened the engagement with a document audit rather than a software selection process. Our workflow automation services always start there.

Step 1: Map the document production workflow.
First, we catalogued every standard document type the firm produced over a rolling three-month period, recorded the time each one consumed, and ranked them by volume and structural consistency. NDAs, board minutes, and straightforward commercial agreements accounted for 60 percent of standard document volume.

Step 2: Rationalise the templates before automating them.
This was the step the firm had never taken and could not take on its own. Therefore, we brought the relevant partners into one room to agree a single current version of each high-volume document type — one NDA, one board minute structure, one standard commercial agreement framework. The disagreements were real, and resolving them took time. In the end, however, the firm walked away with partner-approved templates that reflected its current best practice, and with clause language that stood up against SRA expectations on client care and competence.

Step 3: Design the legal document automation layer.
Next, we built template-driven automation across the eight highest-volume document types. Each template applies conditional logic to the common variants — different party structures, jurisdiction choices, specific clause inclusions — so the fee earner never drafts from scratch and never hunts for the right version.

The automation also pulls party names, matter references, and key commercial terms straight from the practice management system. Consequently, data entry shrinks to the handful of elements that genuinely vary by matter.

Step 4: Integrate with the existing document management system.
Finally, the system files each completed document into the correct matter folder the moment the fee earner signs it off, working alongside the firm’s existing Microsoft 365 stack. No manual saving. No misfiling.

The Results of Legal Document Automation

Standard document production time fell by 70 percent across the automated document types. In other words, a 60-minute drafting task became a 15-minute review of a document the system had already generated.

Across the practice, that recovered eight to ten hours of senior associate time every week. Moreover, the firm now spends those hours on chargeable work instead of routine production.

Template rationalisation delivered its own return, quite separate from the technology. The recurring errors from outdated precedents stopped immediately. Partners stopped correcting the same mistakes. Junior lawyers trusted their template choice, because only one template survived.

Finally, the six-NDA problem — which had festered for years and had twice attracted a “let’s sort this out” email that went nowhere — closed as a by-product of the project rather than as its headline.

Severus anonymised this case study and changed client details to protect confidentiality.

Related: Workflow Automation Services · All Severus case studies