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As artificial intelligence reshapes the legal industry, boutique law firms are finding new ways to compete with Australia’s largest practices.
Commercial boutique law firm Baystone Legal is demonstrating how smaller law firms can challenge Australia’s biggest players through smarter technology and more efficient workflows.
Operating across Brisbane and Sydney, the firm combines legal AI platform Legora with automation tools to streamline document reviews, transaction processes and everyday legal tasks.
In October, team members reported completing an estimated 35 per cent more work and saving an average of 49 hours per person each month.
Managing partner Victor Asoyo and co-founder and partner Roy Kim spoke to Lawyers Weekly and shared how the right balance of AI, automation, and human expertise is transforming legal services, improving efficiencies and assisting boutique firms, like Baystone Legal, to compete with larger practices.
Competing with BigLaw through AI
Asoyo and Kim highlighted how utilising AI tools such as Legora, alongside practice management tools Atto B and Atto X, and Slack, assisted their small firm by creating extra space to focus on more sophisticated aspects of work.
“It helped us boost capacity because it created extra room for us to focus on the higher-value tasks by using AI on a lot of preparation work, analysis, [and] review that would ordinarily take a huge chunk of time for our lawyers,” Kim said.
“We’ve made a significant effort into educating our lawyers on how to use AI properly, understanding the extent of the AI and educating our lawyers on the quality of the input and determining the quality of the output.”
For Baystone Legal, Asoyo mentioned that the benefits of combining AI and automation go beyond efficiency, while keeping legal expertise and human judgement at the heart of its work.
“Some of our staff have recorded anecdotally that they can do 35 per cent more work now from utilising the tech piece, and they save from using our system,” Asoyo said.
“For you to be a good utiliser of AI in the legal space, you still need to be a good lawyer.
“The AI is great at compiling and summarising stuff, but if you don’t know what you’re looking at, then you don’t know what you’re looking at.”
Smarter legal tech and automation
For Baystone Legal, competing through technology means knowing when to use AI and when automation offers a more practical solution, particularly in transaction-heavy areas.
“For transactional work that Baystone does predominantly, most of our work is actually automated, and AI comes in where it makes sense, as opposed to coming into place on every part of the workflow,” Kim said.
“You really need to understand which technology is going to do what as opposed to just AI-ing everything.”
Through the development of its own automation platform alongside the implementation of Legora to execute detailed analytical duties, the firm has crafted a tech strategy custom-built around operational requirements and client expectations.
“We’ve used an automation platform that we’ve built because we couldn’t find something in the market that actually does what we’re trying to achieve,” Asoyo said.
“Legora comes into that piece where you need to do analysis or structuring or reviewing a whole mass of documents and then giving you a legal position in terms of what you’re trying to achieve.”
Will the AI craze last?
Although AI remains a focal point for the legal sector, Kim and Asoyo highlight that its lasting impact is dependent on how well firms integrate the technology, combine it with complementary tools, and convert initial enthusiasm into sustained operational efficiency.
“Whether some law firms are going to be successful or not is largely dependent on the implementation of it, putting the right guardrails, putting the right use cases and also understanding whether AI is even the right solution in the first place,” Kim said.
“I think it really depends on the law firm’s attitude and them figuring out what a perfect mix between AI and non-AI tools [is].”
Asoyo said: “Anybody who’s not thinking about AI is unfortunately going to get left behind.”
“Even to a small piece, if you’re not thinking of how you can implement it to help improve your business and your operations, there’s a lot of benefit.”
“I think the noise will eventually die down; at the end of the day, the reality is, does it make your business more efficient?
“Then moving forward, I think it’ll become part of any business.
“Like the internet and then the mobile phone, these things were all the talk, they’re all fancy, but then as time has gone along, they’re just essential infrastructure, and what you need to do your business.”
