ERP for a law firm:
matters, billing, and a Copilot bot.
Built end-to-end: a matter management system, a billable-hours and invoice module with a four-step approval chain, document control on SharePoint, and a Copilot Studio bot that lets the team ask questions across the matter base in plain English.
A 12-day billing cycle and matters scattered across seven cities.
The firm, a full-service practice with offices across several Indian cities, was running each office on its own version of a stack of habits. Time entries lived in Outlook calendar invites, paper notebooks, and a different shared Excel per practice group. Matter documents sat on local network drives that nobody could reach from another office. Invoicing was a monthly scramble where the billing team chased dozens of lawyers for time data, then shuttled drafts through partners who were rarely in the same room.
What we found in the requirement study:
- An invoice took 12 days on average from draft to client send. One had been stuck for 41 days because the lead partner was in trial in another city.
- Conflict checks before taking on a new matter were an internal email to the practice heads. One conflict had slipped through across two offices and almost ended a referral relationship.
- Three versions of the same draft contract sat in a matter folder named 'Acme NDA v2 (final) (FINAL) - revised.docx'. A junior associate had spent half a day finding the right one.
- Cross-office matter visibility was effectively zero. The Delhi billing team had no clean way to see what Mumbai litigation had clocked that week.
They had looked at LegalTech SaaS: CaseFox, MyCase, a few Indian options. All assumed a US billing model (six-minute slots, ABA-format invoices) and none of them spoke GST. The team wanted something that fit the way the firm actually billed.
One system. The way the firm actually runs.
Matter management, end to end
Every matter has its own record: client, opposing party, practice area, lead lawyer, hearing calendar, document folder, billing arrangement. The firm calls them 'matters' (not 'cases'), so that's what the UI calls them too.
Clients and conflict checks
A corporate client can have a dozen matters across years. Before opening a new matter, the system runs a conflict check across all parties, current and historical, and flags anyone within two degrees.
Billable time + GST invoicing
Built-in timer plus quick time-entry. Lawyers tag every entry to a matter. Rates come from per-lawyer cards, with overrides for retainer matters. Invoices auto-compute GST at 18% and number sequentially in line with audit requirements.
Four-step approval workflow
Drafter → senior lawyer → managing partner → billing. Each step has its own SLA. The chain is built on Power Automate so a reminder fires every 24 hours if a step is stuck. Invoices that used to take 12 days now go out in 2.
Document control · SharePoint-backed
Files live in SharePoint, mapped one-to-one with each matter. Auto-naming enforces a convention. Version history is on by default. No more 'FINAL (revised)' filenames. Internal-vs-client-shared scoping is at the file level.
Copilot Studio bot
A bot that sits in Teams and answers in plain English: 'What's the status of LIT-2025-0142?', 'Show me Acme's latest NDA', 'Which invoices have been stuck in approval over a week?' Grounded only on the firm's own data. No fishing on the open web.
Four people. One invoice. Two business days.
- 01
Drafter
Same dayJunior associate · Priya S.Pulls time entries for the matter, writes a one-line narrative per entry, submits. - 02
Senior review
≤ 24hLead lawyer · Karan M.Adjusts entries down if hours look high. Adds or removes line items. Can kick back to drafter with comments. - 03
Partner sign-off
≤ 24hManaging partnerReviews the total against the client's retainer / cap. Approves or rejects with a single click. Never has to open Excel. - 04
Billing & send
Same dayBilling executive · AnuAuto-generated PDF on the firm's letterhead, GST line auto-added, sequential invoice number locked. Emailed from the matter record.
Plain-English queries. Grounded on the firm's own data.
Most "AI for lawyers" tools point an LLM at the public internet and hope. That's not useful when the question is "what did Karan email the opposing counsel last week?" The answer isn't on Google.
We built the bot in Copilot Studio, grounded entirely on the firm's own data: the matter database, the SharePoint document library, the invoice ledger. It lives in Microsoft Teams so lawyers can ask from desktop or phone.
The scope is intentionally narrow. It looks things up; it doesn't draft pleadings. The team trusts a tool that says "here are the three relevant files" more than one that pretends to write the argument for them.
"We used to lose two days a month to billing chaos. Now an invoice goes out before I've finished my morning coffee. The bot was a gimmick we asked for. Turns out the juniors use it more than I do."
We build the ERP. You stop chasing invoices.
Running a professional services firm? A 30-minute discovery call. We map the process, point out the easy wins, and outline a clear plan (no obligation).