How the firm runs.
A lawyer is needed for judgment and for advocacy. The rest can be built.
In our practice, all of the data entry is done by AI. Every email, document and court date is read, classified and filed to its matter by agents trained on ten years of the firm's own precedents and working from the primary sources: legislation, judgments and the bench books. Deadlines are tracked without anyone needing to remember them, the authorities are on the file before they are asked for, and the first draft is waiting before the lawyer sits down to work.
None of this replaces the lawyer. It clears away what used to stand between the lawyer and the work, and it means a client of a small firm gets the kind of attention that was once only possible with a large one.
How we got here
Three stages.
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Stage one
Learning what works
We started like any other firm: off-the-shelf software and staff doing data entry. It was not good enough.
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Stage two
Stella
Once the problem was clear, the answer was not on the market. Nothing available suited a practice where a lawyer simply wanted to go to court, so we stopped looking and started building. Stella began as a matter system and became the platform the firm runs on, from the inbox to the court diary, and then to research and first drafts. A lawyer checks the work before anything leaves the office.
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Stage three
Plea Assist
Plea Assist is our access to justice initiative. Many people facing a road safety matter or a summary offence do not need a lawyer; they need help preparing. Plea Assist takes them through the questions a good solicitor would ask and assembles what a magistrate needs to hear. It launches on 1 November 2026.
Stella
Everything that is not law.
Stella is the firm's own practice management system, written inside the firm and run by AI agents. Its first job is data entry, and it does all of it. Every email that arrives is read, matched to the matter it belongs to and filed, with the sender, the date and any attachments recorded against the file. Court dates, return dates and limitation dates are taken from the correspondence and placed in the diary. New matters are opened, references assigned and the file built from the first email onward. No one in the firm types a court date, saves an attachment or formats a letter.
Above the data entry sit the agents that prepare. They pull the legislation, the authorities and the bench book passages a matter will need and attach them to the file, and they draft the first version of the reply, the letter or the submission from the firm's own precedents. The lawyer opens a file that is already complete and already drafted, and spends the day on what is left: reading, deciding, signing and appearing.
An email arrives at 6:39PM. By the time the lawyer opens the file the next morning it has been read and filed to the matter, the court date is in the diary, the authorities are attached and a first reply is drafted. The lawyer reads, changes, signs and sends. That is the hour you pay for.
Plea Assist
For people without a lawyer.
Not every charge needs a lawyer. For road safety matters and summary offences, what most people need is to be prepared: who they are, what happened, and what they have done since. Plea Assist takes them through those questions in plain language, assembles the material a magistrate needs to hear, and lets them rehearse before the day. It is our access to justice initiative, built on the way we have always prepared our own pleas.
Launching 1 November 2026The rules we keep
Technology in a regulated profession needs clear limits. These are ours.
A lawyer signs off
AI prepares and organises. A lawyer reads, decides and signs. Every piece of advice you receive carries a lawyer's name and a lawyer's responsibility.
Your matter stays yours
Your information is used for your matter and for nothing else. It is not pooled, shared or used to train anything.
Checked against the source
Research starts from legislation, judgments and the bench books, and nothing is relied on until a lawyer has read the source for themselves.
Only where it helps
We keep a tool only where it makes the work better for the client. If it does not, it goes.