NEXT Legal is a boutique US cross-border transactional firm bridging the United States, Latin America and Europe, with counsel on more than $2B of venture investment since 2018. Most of its attorneys are dual-licensed. In August 2026 we put an agent inside the firm's Slack, pointed it at the firm's own document library, and gave it a schedule.
The agent reaches the firm's document library through a read-only connector. It finds, searches inside, compares and cites. It cannot edit, move, rename or delete anything, and that is a property of the connector rather than a setting someone can flip.
Mail, calendar and drive across the firm's accounts, with the partner as super administrator. Reading and drafting only; nothing is sent without a person.
No console, no new tool to learn, no @mention required. Staff type in a channel or a DM and the answer comes back in a thread, with an eyes reaction while it works and a check when it lands.
The agent runs on a firm machine, so twenty years of closed deals and the documents people actually work in are in reach without shipping anything to a third party.
Four run today. The rest are built and waiting on one credential each from the firm's practice-management system, which is a procurement step rather than an engineering one. We split the list by what is actually blocking, never by what sounds better.
| When | Job | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 02:00 nightly | Precedent index refresh | Live |
| 07:00 weekdays | Morning brief: what changed, what is owed, what is due | Live |
| Every 30 minutes | Inbox watch with a payment-change alarm | Live |
| 03:00 Sunday | Mailbox security sweep — app passwords, tokens, forwarding, delegates | Live |
| 18:30 weekdays | Time capture: the day's activity as draft entries | Waiting on a key |
| Hourly | New matter intake | Waiting on a key |
| 16:00 Friday | Unbilled and stalled-matter sweep | Waiting on a key |
| 08:00 Monday | Conflicts sweep | Waiting on a key |
| 20:00 nightly | Closing binder tracker | Waiting on a key |
These are modelled figures, not booked savings. They assume eight fee earners, a $450 blended rate, forty-five billable weeks, and a deliberately conservative fifty per cent conversion from freed hours into billable ones. Every number reads off one shared model, so the deck and the report cannot disagree with each other, and the headcount assumption is stated on the client's own copy rather than buried. Change the assumption and the whole page rebuilds.
The agent reads, sorts, drafts and finds on its own. Sending mail, booking anything a client sees, billing time, and filing or deleting a document all stop at a person. That line holds for every automation added later, and it is the answer the firm gives to every client security questionnaire from now on. In a regulated practice, an agent that cannot be trusted to stop is not a saving.