General-purpose chat tools invent case law and have no wall between one client and the next. StellaIQ builds AI into your own document system, scoped one matter at a time, with every answer linked to the passage it came from — and automates the admin around it, so fee-earners spend their hours on work they can bill.
Because the first invented citation is the one nobody forgets.
Most firms have tried a general chat tool. It drafts a plausible paragraph, summarises a document in seconds, and then cites a case that does not exist. UK courts have already criticised lawyers for relying on authorities an AI tool made up, and no partner wants the firm's name in the next judgment.
The deeper problem is structural. A general tool does not know which client a document belongs to, answers from wherever it likes, and cannot show where an answer came from without somebody redoing the research. So the fee-earner does the work twice: once with the tool, and once to check it.
Meanwhile the unbillable hours carry on as before — opening files, chasing ID documents, running conflict searches, recording time, indexing bundles, and hunting for the precedent somebody drafted three years ago.
Most of a firm's admin is automation, and you should not pay for AI to do it.
Opening a file, running a conflict search, chasing a client for proof of address, reminding a fee-earner about unrecorded time, sending the bill — that is rules. Rules are instant, cheap, auditable, and incapable of inventing an answer.
AI earns its place in reading: summarising a long lease or a disclosure bundle, finding the clause across your precedent bank, answering a question from a matter file. It is only fit for that job if every answer points to the passage it came from, and it says not found rather than guessing. That is the standard we build to.
Ranked by the fee-earner hours they take back, not by what demos well.
Each matter's documents sit in their own vault. Ask a question and the answer comes back with the exact passage it was drawn from, one click from the source. Nothing crosses from one client's matter into another's.
Search that only looks where you tell it to: legislation.gov.uk, the National Archives' Find Case Law service, your precedent bank and your firm's know-how. Never the open web.
Leases, contracts and disclosure summarised with page references into a note on the file, with key dates proposed for the diary for a fee-earner to confirm.
Identity, proof of address and source-of-funds documents requested, chased until they arrive and filed against the matter. The anti-money-laundering checks themselves stay with your compliance team.
Enquiry details captured once, a conflict search run against your records and presented for a person to clear, and the matter opened in your case management system.
Draft time entries built from email and the calendar for fee-earners to approve, work-in-progress reports without the spreadsheet, and overdue bills chased on schedule.
No. Fee-earners keep working in the systems they know. The work happens around them, and the results land where your team already looks.
We meet a wide range of systems in legal practice: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments; case and practice management including Clio, LEAP, Actionstep, Osprey, Proclaim and Access Legal; and Microsoft 365 behind them. Where there is an API we use it. Where there is not, we work with the exports the system already produces.
Confidentiality is designed in, not configured afterwards. Everything runs in your own cloud tenancy under your own administrator credentials, access follows the permissions and information barriers you already have, and nothing is used to train anyone else's model.
Fixed prices, stated plainly, before you commit to anything.
An operations audit costs £2,500 plus VAT. We spend time with the people doing the work — fee-earners, secretaries and whoever runs compliance and accounts, not just the partners — and you get a ranked map of every opportunity with a figure against each one, an assessment of what your document and case management systems can integrate with, and a first build scoped at a fixed price. The audit stands on its own and belongs to you.
A first automation build starts at £5,000 plus VAT. One workflow designed, built, deployed and handed over documented, with your team trained and thirty days of post-launch support. A full engagement across several workstreams starts at £12,500 plus VAT. Ongoing support is there if you want it, but you will not be sold a retainer for work that has a finish line. A discovery call costs nothing and is a conversation with the founder, not a salesperson.
Everything is built in your own cloud account, fully documented, with administrator access from the first day.
Two days on site, a ranked opportunity map with a value against each item, and a first build scoped at a fixed price.
One workflow built end to end, documented, with your team trained and thirty days of support.
Discovery, design and deployment across several workstreams.
The engine underneath is already in production in other sectors. For a national industrial services company, StellaIQ cut manual document processing time by roughly 80% across a fifteen-day build, reading paperwork automatically and filing it against the right job across an ERP, HubSpot and Microsoft 365. For an installer taking seventy appointments a day, handwritten sheets now go straight into the CRM, diary and sales spreadsheet — nothing typed, three to four hours a day given back.
A law firm's documents are different and the stakes are higher, but the discipline is the one we apply everywhere: read what arrives, put it where it belongs, and when the system is not sure, ask a person instead of guessing.
We do not publish client names, and we will not publish yours either.
No. It finds, drafts and summarises; a qualified person reviews and signs off. Responsibility for the work stays with the solicitor, exactly as it does now.
It answers only from the sources you allow, every answer carries the passage it was drawn from, and when the source is not there it says so. A citation you cannot open is a citation it does not give.
Documents stay in your own cloud tenancy under your own administrator credentials. Each matter is its own vault, access follows your existing permissions, and nothing is used to train anyone else's model.
Usually not. Most of the cost sits in the gaps between systems rather than inside any one of them. If a system genuinely is the constraint we will say so, but we will not lead with it.
A standard engagement runs fifteen days from kickoff to a working system. The audit before it is two days on site and a written report within ten working days.
We work with businesses between roughly £1m and £20m turnover. The test is simple: how many fee-earner hours a week go on admin nobody can bill?
Forty-five minutes, no obligation, and an honest answer about which of your problems is worth automating and which is not.
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