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Industries/Law firms
Non-billable work,
handled by agents.
Agents take on the work your firm cannot bill for, starting with complex, template-heavy drafting that currently runs through ageing automation or gets done by hand.
Your associates and paralegals go back to chargeable work.
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Schedule 3 · Conditions precedent
evidence that each Obligor listed in [GROUP STRUCTURE, TWO ENTITIES NOT ON THE MATTER RECORD] has passed the resolutions set out in paragraph 2
the security documents listed in Part II, being [SECURITY PACKAGE, AWAITING PARTNER DECISION], duly executed by the relevant Obligor
In the same replyCovering noteOpen points listedQuestions to the sender
A Word document in your own template, back in the mailbox it was sent from. The covering note lists what the agent could not resolve, so the first thing an associate or a partner sees is the short list of decisions that are actually theirs. Screens are illustrative and use fictional matter data.
01 · The pile
Client delivery you cannot bill.
It is complex, fiddly and template-heavy. It runs through a document automation system the firm does not want to touch, or through associates doing it by hand. Four shapes come up at almost every firm.
Centralised templates, deep conditional logic
Documents where the clause depends on several facts at once, and the decision about which template and which clause should not sit with whoever picks the matter up.
The 11pm Friday first draft
An associate sends “here is the first draft, can you check it” and a partner inherits a hundred pieces of markup on work the client will never be charged for.
The request that sits until Monday
Routine drafting that lands late on a Friday and waits, because it needs a person and the person has gone home.
The rush job you cannot invoice
A 70-page agreement that suddenly has to turn around tonight. Associates work through the night, and the firm cannot then bill the rush without damaging the relationship it was protecting.
How to tell whether you have this
Two or more of these usually means the pile is bigger than anyone has measured.
- A document automation contract now running year to year, because nobody signs multi-year renewals on it any more
- Practice groups the old system never covered, still drafting by hand
- Paralegals choosing clauses, and associates choosing templates
- Write-offs on urgent turnarounds for your best clients
- Someone maintaining the templates by hand, and dreading it
02 · The argument
More chargeable hours, and a better service under pressure.
Two arguments, for two kinds of partner. One is about money. The other is about the client relationship, and it is the one that gets a partner leaning in.
For the partner who has a cost problem
Under eat-what-you-kill this is personal, not abstract. A partner who stops absorbing non-billable drafting puts associates and paralegals on chargeable work, takes on more matters, and bills more hours. The work you currently cannot bill for gets done for you.
For the partner who does not think they have one
Your best enterprise client sends a 70-page agreement that has to move tonight, because something moved ahead of an IPO. Today the only way to protect the relationship is to throw associates at it and eat the cost. Take that away and the firm delivers a better service, faster, without the write-off.
The first is a cost argument. The second is a client-retention argument. Both end in the same place: the firm's people back on the work the firm can charge for.
03 · Migration
Where document automation stops.
Answer a questionnaire and a template assembles itself, the same way every time. Determinism is the whole point of document automation, and the whole of its limit. A template cannot read what arrives, and it cannot decide anything nobody thought of when it was built.
The ceiling
Engagement letterTen merge fields, no branching
Board minutesOne template, one set of names
NDA on your formQuestionnaire in, document out
Drafting from a threadFacts the questionnaire never asked for
Terms in a tableA table whose shape changes every time
Hundred-page instrumentA position on page 4 held on page 90
Document automationFlank
The line is not length, it is branching. Everything below it can stay where it is for now. Everything above it has always fallen back to associates, and that is the pile.
Migrate, do not restart
HotDocs, Contract Express and Clarilis contracts now run year to year, which puts an annual decision point at every firm running one. We take what you have, the templates, the logic and the questionnaires, and move it one document type at a time, starting with the practice groups the old system never reached.
04 · How it works
The work arrives the way the work already arrives.
The firm points one of its own mailboxes at each agent. A lawyer emails it much as they would email a colleague, and the work comes back the same way: a covering note, the document marked up, the open points listed.
Your lawyerSend the workTo a firm mailbox, the way you would send it to a colleague
AgentRead what arrivedThe thread, the attachments, the matter
AgentPull the rest togetherCRM, playbook, template and matter information
AgentAsk the senderWhere something is missing, rather than fill the gap
AgentDraft to your templateYour playbook decides the positions and where they belong
AgentReturn it marked upCovering note, the document, open points listed
Your lawyerKeep the judgmentDecide the open points, sign off
AgentWrite it backThe settled position into the document that arrived
Nobody logs into anything. A practice group is never onboarded onto software it will not open. The two human steps are at either end, and both are decisions.
Where the determinism lives
Your position lives in your playbook, written by your lawyers. The structure lives in your template. The agent reads what came in, works out which of your positions apply and decides where they belong. It writes nothing that is not already in the playbook, and it never decides a position. The question stops being whether to trust a model to draft, and becomes whether you trust your own playbook.
05 · In practice
Simmons & Simmons build on Flank.
An international firm of more than 1,000 lawyers across more than 23 offices. Its legal engineering business, Wavelength, houses an Applied AI team that builds agents for the firm's own lawyers and for the firm's clients. The firm is not short of AI tools; the question it asks is where a tool helps a lawyer do the work, and where the work leaves the desk altogether and comes back done.
1,000+
lawyers across the firm
23+
offices
2025
working with Flank since, across UK and Middle East practices
4
workflows built by the firm's own team, across drafting and review
The agentInputOutput
Securitisation review, for a banking clientTransaction documents past ninety pages, and the checklist the lawyers already work fromThe documents marked up, and a table of what needs a lawyer's eyeLive
Complex drafting, from unstructured inputSource data with no two laid out alike, and the firm's standard templateThe template filled, and a question to the sender wherever something is missingLive
Complex drafting, from the playbookThe firm's templates and playbook, and agreements from 19 to over 80 pagesA draft built from the source materials, and a review of what came backLive
Pensions contractual termsA trustee's terms in a table whose shape changes every time, and the insurer's playbookThe same document returned marked up, each position explained against the playbookLive
What the agents never do: decide a position. The securitisation agent tells a lawyer what to look at; it does not sign anything off. The agents ask rather than invent, and write nothing that is not already in the playbook.
2025
Served
The firm was delivering work to its own clients on Flank agents, built with our forward deployed team, before it had built one itself.
Early 2026
Self-serve
After two days with the Flank team, the Applied AI team began building directly, in two streams: agents for the firm's internal work, and agents behind services the firm sells.
2026
Shaping what gets built
One workflow needed a capability that did not yet exist: writing a finished review back into the document that had just arrived. The firm specified it, and it shipped.
WatchHow Simmons & Simmons put agents in production. Three minutes with Lucy Shurwood, Partner.
“Through our partnership with Flank, we've embedded agents that handle the drafting, review, and negotiation of NDAs, DPAs, service agreements, IMAs, and more. These agents are live and already delivering real impact for our teams and our clients.”
Lucy ShurwoodPartner, Simmons & Simmons
Step one
Use it inside the firm
The non-billable drafting pile, one document type first. Associates and paralegals go back to chargeable work.
Step two
Package it as a service
The same agents behind an offering your clients buy from you: firm-branded work, the firm's lawyers supervising, at a different cost base.
Step three
Bring it to your client base
The firm holds the client relationship and the quality layer. Flank is the platform underneath.
Who supervises is yours to choose
The firm's own lawyers review, or the firm reviews on a client's behalf. The second is how Flank runs inside firms today: the firm's know-how in the playbook, the firm's name on the work, and a delivery cost the old model could not reach. For firms and ALSPs who want to build a practice on it, see how we work with partners.
07 · Getting live
A paid pilot on one document type.
The entry is deliberately small: one document type, high volume, low variance, sized so an innovation team can sign it on its own authority without a business case. Setup is paid and stated up front.
W1W2W3W4W5W6W7W8
Document type 1BuildYour testLive, review at 100%, coming down on your evidence
Document type 2BuildYour testLive
Legacy migrationTemplates, logic and questionnaires movedYour testLive
Your timeTwo thirty-minute sessions a week with your legal engineers or PSLs, plus testing
Flank builds and testsYour experts testSigned off and live
Your lawyers should not trust a first draft they did not write. Not at first. Review sits at 100% at the start and comes down on your evidence and your criteria, not ours.
Confidentiality and security
Inside your perimeter from day one. A dedicated tenant in your chosen region, zero data retention with model providers, SSO and MFA, integration with your own email estate, and a full audit trail behind every request, question and draft. Client confidentiality and professional secrecy are part of the pilot's security review, answered in writing before anything runs.
08 · The whole platform
Drafting is the entry point, not the limit.
The same supervised agents run the rest of the practice on one platform.
Agentic drafting
The mechanism behind this page: complex, conditional documents and the packs around them, drafted from your templates.
Learn more →
Agentic review
Counterparty paper read against your playbook, every redline applied, held checks decided by your lawyer.
Learn more →
Franchising & licensing
The deepest deployment of the drafting workflow, live at two global hotel groups.
Learn more →
Intake & triage
One front door for everything a practice group sends, routed by your rules.
Learn more →
Contract record
Every executed agreement filed at signature, so the record and the contract stop drifting apart.
Learn more →
Partners
For firms and ALSPs building a client offering on Flank: the three partnership tracks and what each gets.
Learn more →
FAQ
You should build plenty of things, and this is the one that bites. The work happens inside the .docx, which is XML, and manipulating it reliably is a genuine engineering problem; our own third-party paper review was delayed more than once for exactly that reason. A firm that builds this ends up maintaining a document-generation engine, which is not what an innovation team is for. Worth asking what the last build cost, who maintains it, and which practice groups still are not covered.
That is exactly who we are for. Most of those contracts now run year to year because nobody renews them long-term any more, and most cover a fraction of the practice groups that draft at volume. We migrate what you have, the templates, the logic and the questionnaires, rather than starting again, and we start with the document types the old system never reached.
They should not, at first. Review sits at 100% at the start and comes down on your evidence and your criteria, not ours. The pilot starts with one document type that is high volume and low variance, so the first weeks build the evidence quickly. Every draft shows its working: the position it applied, where it applied it, and what it could not resolve.
It is the point. General assistants stop reading reliably somewhere around sixty pages; firms routinely work at ninety and past a hundred, and a position taken on page four has to hold on page ninety. The agents work at that length because the position is not held by a model. It lives in your playbook, and the agent applies it wherever in the document it belongs.
No. The firm points one of its own mailboxes at each agent. A lawyer emails it the way they would email a colleague, and the work comes back the same way: a covering note, the document marked up, the open points listed. Nobody logs in, and no practice group is onboarded onto software it will never open.
Yes. At Simmons & Simmons the Applied AI team began building directly after two days with the Flank team, in two streams at once: agents for the firm's internal work, and agents behind services the firm sells to clients. Our forward deployed team builds the first ones with you; how far your own team takes it after that is up to you.
Every month the pile stays manual is client delivery the firm absorbs and cannot bill. The pilot is small, it is one document type, and it is priced so the decision does not need a business case. If the old automation contract is up for its annual renewal, that is the natural moment.
Inside your security perimeter: a dedicated tenant in your chosen region, zero data retention with model providers, single sign-on and MFA, and integration with your own email estate. Administrators see a full audit trail of every request, question and draft. Client confidentiality and professional secrecy are covered in the pilot's security review, in writing, before anything runs.
