Maybe you've seen Harvey, the agentic AI tool that automates law firm workflows. The company is raising money at a rumored $15 billion valuation, boasts over 500 enterprise customers, and is used by law firms in 54 countries.
The buzzword is workflows.
Everything is a workflow
Harvey automates workflows. When the AI bubble pops and talk of midwifing deities wanes, the legacy of this moment will be the agentic automation of workflows. That will only accelerate.
When I was a new associate at Alston & Bird way back in the day, my office was flooded with bankers boxes full of documents. My job was to manually perform diligence on loan assumptions that were changing hands within securitized pools of loans.
The work was long and tedious and I lasted a very short time. This was 2007 and I was being paid $145,000 to perform mindless due diligence for banking clients.
The fact that I hated the job isn't the point. I wasn't planning a grand litigation strategy, I was executing a workflow, and this is where Harvey lives: finding legal workflows that can be replaced by AI.
They write candidly about the state of automation, what can and cannot be automated, and where things are headed. Consider this quote from the Harvey blog:
Automation does not eliminate the need for legal expertise. It removes the repetitive overhead that prevents lawyers from applying their expertise to the problems that actually require it.
The retainer problem
I had retired from law firm SEO entirely to pursue other projects. A big part of the reason why was the tension I felt in the legal marketing retainer model. Clients who were with me for years still paid us what they paid when they signed up with us. We were still doing what we could for their accounts, but things were dialed in and required less work to maintain.
As I have written in previous blogs, the industry has a big problem: much of the valuable work is front loaded, and after that a maintenance layer kicks in. The initial strategy and website build, choice of tech stack, all that can sometimes require high level input (even though most legal agencies cluster around the same solutions over and over with zero strategy or creativity).
Don't get me wrong, the maintenance layer is necessary. But firms will sit with an agency for years paying the same rate they did at the outset of the engagement regardless of whether work gets done that month.
Marketing is the exception
The current state of legal tech is rapid AI adoption in most verticals, with marketing as the exception.
Legal marketing agencies are tied to an outdated retainer model that charges indefinitely for workflows that AI agents can handle with ease. They can't move to an agentic approach because it would shrink their retainers.
As with AmLaw firms, it doesn't mean the marketers go away, it just means they can start marketing again instead of overcomplicating their own workflows. We have envisioned this as a Work order system. When a task that the marketing team needs to tackle arrives in the queue, it gets assigned to a team member.
So I built Associate
So, I built an AI agent to fix the biggest problem I saw in the industry: inconsistent maintenance, maintenance that is too expensive. This is what Harvey is talking about when they talk about removing "repetitive overhead."
Newsflash: WordPress has a REST API. We don't need a new marketing associate logging into WP to build internal links and update page titles any longer.
Associate unbundles the legal marketing offering.
Try Our AI Agent Built for Law Firms
Three ways to work with Associate
For firms that truly don't want to touch their marketing, we offer a white-glove service where we run the agentic process and execute the Work orders as they arise. The difference between Associate and a traditional agency retainer is price (we are priced more reasonably) and consistency, the agent is always working, it never takes a week or a month off.
It is constantly watching competitor sites and campaigns, interfacing with API data from WordPress, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity, and overall running a tight ship.
For firms who want to run leaner, you can execute campaigns with Associate for as little as $499 per month, this gives lawyers hanging a shingle or running a low-overhead operation a puncher's chance.
Last, you can use Associate as a tool to guide your trusted agency partner. Some firms have agencies they love. It's rare they're doing real marketing work, they typically are the outsourced IT department for technical "marketing-adjacent tasks," but keep them and use Associate to watch them and feed them ideas, plus Work orders when our AI flags one. Our AI will tell your agency what to do and keep them honest with an independent monthly report on the state of your marketing, plus actually assign them work.
The bottom line
The bottom line is this: the AmLaw 100 is using AI agents to automate workflows for complex legal work.
The retainer budget most firms pay an agency is dedicated to a maintenance layer that will now run with our AI agent, Associate. These workflows are able to be automated, we are building the agent to handle them, and passing the savings on to the firms.
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