Legal
AI for legal teams thatcites its working.
Practical AI for UK law firms. Search your own precedents, review contracts faster, and keep compliance on track. Every answer linked back to the source paragraph. Nothing privileged leaves your network.
Precedent search · interface flow
Query
Which prior matters address this clause?
The strongest matching reasoning appears across three prior matters.
- Source A · paragraph 4191%
- Source B · paragraph 1887%
- Source C · paragraph 0982%
Backed by Appoly
Built by Appoly's UK software delivery team. We bring the same production security, auditability and governance practices used in our legal RAG case study and across Appoly's AI services.
Where it works
Four applications
we've shipped.
Precedent and case-file retrieval
The work your firm has done sits across PDFs, scanned bundles, Word documents, and partner inboxes. Public databases (Westlaw, LexisNexis) cover public case law. Your internal precedents are the bit that's actually privileged and competitive, and the bit nobody can find. We build retrieval systems that read legal context, not keywords, and cite every answer back to the source paragraph.
→ Typical result: Around 70% reduction in precedent research time, measured on partners' own time logs (73% on the public RAG build).
Contract drafting and review
Standard agreements (NDAs, supplier terms, engagement letters, employment contracts) get redrafted from templates that drift. We build systems that assemble the right template, flag missing or unusual clauses, and surface the diffs against your firm's preferred positions. The partner still drafts and negotiates; the system handles the mechanical work around it.
→ Typical result: 4 hours to 45 minutes for standard agreements. Senior time goes to the bespoke work.
Compliance and regulatory monitoring
FCA, SRA, ICO and sector-specific updates land daily. Keeping up costs a compliance officer's week and still misses things. We build systems that ingest the updates, classify them against your client base and matter types, and surface a daily two-minute review queue rather than a weekly half-day.
→ Typical result: Weekly manual review collapses into a daily two-minute scan, with fewer misses and a better audit trail.
Document intake and triage
Inbound correspondence (court orders, statements, schedules, requests) arrives in mixed formats and gets manually classified before it reaches the right person. We build classification systems that read the document, identify type and urgency, extract the structured fields, and route with the original attached. The lawyer doesn't lose context; they save the triage time.
→ Typical result: Triage time falls from minutes per document to seconds. Misrouting drops below 2%.
A project in the open
Fifteen years of case files, searchable in seconds.
A UK commercial litigation firm with 2.3 million pages of internal case files. Partners spent half a day per matter finding analogous precedents: by memory, by email thread, by asking the senior associate who happened to be there. A larger consultancy had quoted them £180k for a fourteen-month "knowledge management transformation" with no commitment to a working interface.
Eight weeks later we'd shipped a citation-first retrieval system over the whole corpus, on the firm's own infrastructure, behind their SSO.
Read the full case study- 73%
- Research time cut
- 2,000+
- Queries per day
- 2.3m
- Pages indexed
- 8 wks
- To production
Constraints we design around
Legal AI fails differently to other AI.
Citation and source verification are non-negotiable
Every retrieved data point or reasoning step carries a direct link to the verified source document. We do not deploy systems where a partner cannot inspect the source paragraph in seconds.
Client confidentiality stays inside your perimeter
Self-hosted embeddings and vector storage on your private infrastructure or VPC, behind your single sign-on. Privileged matter files are never sent to third-party public model APIs. UK data residency by default.
Grounded retrieval eliminates ungrounded answers
Retrieval-first architectures ensure models operate strictly over your firm's verified precedents. Explicit confidence scoring and refusal boundaries are engineered into the design.
Complete auditability for compliance and regulation
Every query, retrieved passage, and generated output is permanently logged with user identity and timestamps, providing an audit trail suitable for professional regulatory scrutiny.
Before you book
See what a diagnostic output looks like.
The two-week diagnostic ends with a specific report: the workflows worth automating, the data and integration requirements, the expected return, and an independent board decision note. We have published an illustrative sample so you can judge the depth before committing to a call.
View the sample diagnosticQuestions
Straight answers on legal AI.
Common questions from UK law firms and in-house teams evaluating precedent search, contract review, and compliance monitoring.
Can AI search our firm's precedents without exposing them?
Yes. We build retrieval systems that run on your infrastructure or private cloud, behind your SSO. Your documents are embedded and stored inside your network, so nothing privileged is sent to a third-party API.
How accurate is AI contract review for UK law?
The system does not replace a lawyer. It flags missing or unusual clauses, surfaces your preferred positions, and assembles the right template. Partners still review and negotiate; the system handles the mechanical comparison against your own playbook.
What stops the AI from hallucinating case law or clauses?
Retrieval-first design. The model only surfaces passages from your verified documents and marks every answer with a clickable source. If the answer is not in the corpus, the system says so rather than inventing one.
Where is our data stored?
UK or EU data residency by default. Vector stores, embeddings, and logs sit on your infrastructure or a cloud tenancy you control. The work is delivered by Appoly's UK software team, with production security, auditability, and governance practices suitable for regulated sectors.
Is there an audit trail for the SRA or our compliance team?
Every query, retrieved passage, and generated response is logged with timestamps and user identity. The audit trail shows what the system was asked, what it returned, and which source documents it used.
What does the two-week diagnostic deliver?
A concrete assessment of which legal workflows are ready for AI, the expected time savings, the data and integration requirements, and a clear go, wait, or no recommendation for your leadership team. You can see an illustrative sample output before booking a call.
Got an archive worth searching properly?
We start with a two-week diagnostic. If the numbers don't work, we tell you and refund the second week.