Your lawyers know which facts matter, where a theory can fail, and what makes a matter worth pursuing. We bring AI tools and forward-deployed engineers to help that judgment reach more of the business: stronger client opportunities, broader services, and greater capacity to deliver.
Law firms, legal departments, legal-service businesses, and professional teams working with complex matters and evidence.
An illustrative NetStartups Preview / Legal
What could your firm take on if preparation stopped setting the limit?
Protect the value of today’s work. Investigate opportunities you currently pass over. Build a practice around expertise that can now reach further.
The full 3×3 / Your business, seen differently
Nine ways your firm could become more capable.
Improve today’s practice. Unlock work that has been uneconomic to investigate. Discover new services and sources of matters. The ambition starts with what your lawyers know.
All nine legal business possibilities across Improve, Unlock, Discover and Clients, Expertise and Services, Automate and Scale.
Ambition ↓ Business →
DemandClients
SupplyExpertise & Services
OperationsAutomate / Scale
Improvethe business you run.
Clients
Turn intake into a clear partner decision
Bring scattered inquiries into a concise view of fit, missing facts, and the next useful conversation.
What NSU could put to work
Daily intake decision brief
Why now: Summarize permitted inquiries against the firm’s screening criteria.
Your edge: Client relationships, referral history, and partner judgment.
Put to work: Prepare one digest with sources, open questions, and accept-or-decline review.
The value test Compare review effort, useful consultations, and follow-through with the current process.
Expertise & Services
Put the firm’s best work within reach
Find relevant precedents and specialist know-how without asking senior lawyers to reconstruct the same answer.
What NSU could put to work
Referenced practice knowledge
Why now: Retrieve from an approved document set with visible source references.
Your edge: Past work, practice methods, and knowledge of exceptions.
Put to work: Show relevant passages, applicability gaps, and the lawyer responsible for review.
The value test Check source permissions, current applicability, and whether the answer is useful.
Automate / Scale
Protect the value of work already done
Improve time capture, fee preparation, and billing handoffs around the tools your people already use.
What NSU could put to work
Time-to-billing review workflow
Why now: Compare permitted activity with existing entries and prepare exceptions for review.
Your edge: The team’s matter knowledge and billing judgment.
Put to work: Verify native features first; configure matter matching, approval, and fee checks for any remaining gap.
The value test Measure confirmed time recorded, approved billing, eventual collections, and total review effort separately.
Unlockambitions that felt out of reach.
Clients
Give more potential matters a fair hearing
Make an initial investigation practical for opportunities the firm currently lacks capacity to assess.
What NSU could put to work
Opportunity screening queue
Why now: Assemble source material and counterevidence before the partner reviews the opportunity.
Your edge: Practice focus, referral routes, and experience distinguishing a lead from a case.
Put to work: Connect sources, a useful brief, and one bounded next check.
The value test Measure useful decisions per review hour and whether the expanded coverage finds worthwhile work.
Expertise & Services
Make smaller recoveries worth a look
Reduce the cost of first diligence so a wider range of potential matters can receive serious consideration.
Why now: Lower preparation cost may make a repeatable review offering feasible.
Your edge: Trusted client access and experience deciding which matters deserve investment.
Put to work: Combine the review workspace, practice criteria, and an initial service scope.
The value test Test willingness to pay, evidence availability, full cost to serve, and what existing services already cover.
Automate / Scale
Build a continuing opportunity function
Explore a firm that develops tomorrow’s work alongside the matters it handles today.
What NSU could put to work
Research-to-practice operating model
Why now: Source-linked research and review histories can preserve what the firm learns between investigations.
Your edge: Partner judgment, institutional memory, and the ability to act on selected ideas.
Put to work: Connect research, explicit decisions, assigned investigations, and learning from results.
The value test Test whether the function advances new worthwhile work beyond making current research faster.
Follow the two highlighted possibilities into the example below. The other seven remain directions to explore. Improve, Unlock, and Discover are parallel sources of value. If an offering is already an ambition, it belongs under Unlock; Discover explores a new direction for this firm.
From possibility to a business offering
From occasional recovery work to a repeatable practice.
What if your firm could assess a wider portfolio of potential recoveries, then spend its judgment on the few that warrant investigation? Lower preparation costs could open a service for clients whose smaller or scattered matters rarely receive a systematic review.
A proposed firm offering
Recovery Review Practice
Look across more potential matters. Know where to spend your judgment.
Concept to validate with the firm and its clients
Who it serves
Trustees, creditors, and business clients with portfolios of transactions or disputes that warrant an initial review.
What the client receives
A source-linked screening brief, a record of adverse facts and missing evidence, and a bounded next investigation for the firm to approve.
How the firm could earn
Test a paid portfolio review, then separately agree any representation. Contingency matters require their own merits, cost, funding, and collection assessment.
A defined service: A screening result does not establish a claim or authorize a demand, contact, filing, or representation.
Inspect the work behind the offering
From a pile of records to a decision worth making.
The largest number is not the best next investigation.
Three fictional payment groups arrive in one referral. The screen reconciles duplicate records, distinguishes transaction value from possible recovery, and identifies the evidence that could change the decision.
The partner’s decision
Which candidate merits a bounded document check before the firm commits to deeper diligence?
A / Resolve the missing basisTwo distinct payments total $84,000. One appears twice in the export. The file lacks the agreement and support for the second payment. Obtain those records before estimating any claim.
B / Test the contrary evidence$126,000 is the largest gross amount. Invoices and delivery records may explain the payments. A bigger number does not justify ranking it first.
C / Do not mistake a name for a matchA $42,000 recipient shares a surname with a company officer. Ownership is unverified. Keep the connection unresolved until an authoritative record establishes identity.
Basis: sample records 01 + 02, with review direction 03.Inspect the Evidence & judgment view.
Partner review / Sample source packet
A reason to investigate. A reason to be skeptical.
Keep the amount, the supporting record, and the unresolved question together.
01 / Fictional payment export
A: $52,000 + $32,000 + a repeated $32,000 transaction ID. B: three $42,000 payments. C: one $42,000 payment.
A reconciles to $84,000, B to $126,000, C to $42,000. These are transaction amounts, not damages or recoveries.
02 / Fictional document inventory
A: one invoice, agreement absent. B: three invoices and three delivery records. C: recipient record and officer roster share a surname; no ownership record is supplied.
Different evidence gaps require different next checks. The supplied export alone cannot answer the merits question.
03 / Illustrative partner direction
For A, obtain the agreement and support for the second payment. For B, inspect the invoices and delivery records. For C, establish identity before assessing any relationship.
A specific next step preserves the countercase. Every candidate still needs legal and economic review.
What NSU’s workflow prepares
Reconcile records, show the basis for each amount, preserve contradictory evidence, and prepare the next useful question. Track the lawyer’s decision and the result of the next check in one review workspace.
What the firm decides
The firm determines the legal theory, applicable law, defenses, deadlines, collectability, conflicts, and whether to accept a matter. A large transaction is not a recoverable claim.
Missing documents and conflicting information remain open questions. Reviewed corrections become test cases for future changes to the workflow.
An illustrative capacity model
What changes when the cost of first diligence falls?
Use the same team capacity to test more possibilities. Change the assumptions to see where the argument holds or fails.
Proposed hours include preparation, lawyer review, and rework. These are editable hypotheses to measure in a Sprint.
Same 36 team hours / month
Current4complete screens
→
Proposed12complete screens
Modeled cost per screen: $1,575 → $575
8 more candidates could receive an initial screen. These are not accepted matters or recoveries.
Illustration, not a forecast. Cost per screen allocates all available team hours at the stated cost, plus added operating cost in the proposed model, across complete screens. It excludes one-time implementation and later investigation or litigation. It assumes sufficient suitable files and the same review standard. Released capacity is not cash savings.
Hourly work
Protect earned value.
Confirm omitted work with the timekeeper. Track additional time recorded, billing approved, and cash collected separately. Activity alone does not establish billable time.
Fixed-fee work
Change the cost to serve.
Compare the agreed fee with preparation, lawyer review, corrections, and operating cost. Released hours become valuable when redeployed or when an actual cost is avoided.
Contingency work
Make more ideas testable.
Reduce the cost of the first investigation. Then assess merits, evidence access, funding needs, collection risk, and time to payment before taking the matter.
Continue only if the firm can review more useful candidates at acceptable cost and quality. Stop if missing records, correction work, weak opportunities, or implementation costs defeat the case.
Fictional records and prewritten analysis illustrate the proposed recovery workflow. The capacity model uses editable assumptions, not customer results. The fee-preparation demo below runs a limited calculation adapted from an existing prototype.
Existing tools / Clear starting points
We bring more than an idea.
Working software and prototypes give us something concrete to demonstrate, test, and adapt with your team.
Existing working software
Research & review workspace
Source-linked briefs, separate review decisions, notes, evidence requests, and a shared history of next actions.
Demand + Supply
A working review application. We demonstrate it with sample material, then configure access, review roles, and the chosen workflow for your firm.
Working browser prototype
Fee preparation builder
Group time entries, total fees, flag descriptions for review, and inspect the effect of an explicit adjustment.
Operations
Try the limited sample below. Court-specific rules, source-system access, and filing preparation require further work.
Prototype & codebase
Matter intelligence
Connect cases, entities, documents, and source provenance so a research view can be traced back to its supporting records.
Demand + Supply
Prototype with sample records. Source coverage, licensing, and deployment are agreed and verified for the firm.
Try the fee preparation prototypeSample entries → review flag → reconciled total
Existing prototype / Limited sample
Inspect the work before approving the number.
This sample adapts the totaling and review workflow from our existing browser prototype. All entries are fictional. It performs local calculations; it does not call an AI model or connect to billing software.
Four fictional time entries
Entry
Work
Hours
Rate
Amount
01
Partner: review matter strategy
1.5
$600
$900
02
Associate: analyze payment records
2.0
$400
$800
03
Associate: “Review file”
0.5
$400
$200
04
Paralegal: collect source documents
1.0
$200
$200
What NetStartups would put into use
A service the firm can deliver. Tools that make it practical.
01
A working review queue
Source register, reconciled records, briefs, and assigned next checks.
Configure existing review components around one agreed matter type. Connect approved inputs and preserve the source behind each finding.
02
Your judgment, made repeatable
Practice criteria, exceptions, permissions, and review cases.
Your lawyers show how they decide. Our forward-deployed engineers turn that knowledge into preparation rules and test the difficult cases with them.
03
A measured business capability
Baseline, cost model, operating guide, and a continue-or-stop decision.
Measure complete review effort and useful decisions. Establish the service scope and economics before expanding the number of matters or clients.
Existing software is the starting point. Firm-specific source access, matter permissions, integrations, legal checks, and deployment still require configuration and testing. Time-capture connections and a private knowledge system are scoped separately; their availability is not assumed.
How we would judge the first deployment
Reconciled amounts, duplicate handling, and source references survive review against the original records.
The workflow preserves adverse facts, uncertain identities, missing evidence, and separate legal decisions.
Agreed access boundaries and human approval gates pass representative tests before use.
Total preparation, review, and correction effort supports the agreed capacity and economic test; weak results can justify stopping.
Scope, inputs, permissions, fee, and acceptance criteria are agreed before paid work. Thirty days defines the Sprint, not a guaranteed business result.
From the first idea to continuing value
Picture it. Test it. Keep developing it.
Tailored Preview
See the practice you could build.
A researched 3×3, a worked example, and a view of the tools already available. A working conversation reshapes the possibilities around the firm’s expertise.
For this example: one agreed record set, a configured review queue, source-linked briefs, lawyer review, and measured effort against the existing process.
A repeatable recovery review could lead to a new referral channel, a specialist offering for a different client group, or a portfolio relationship. The 3×3 keeps those possibilities visible while actual results determine what deserves investment.
Connect client context, approved firm knowledge, and matter evidence to see where the firm’s judgment could help next. Prepare traceable work that professionals can challenge, improve, and shape into useful services.
Your edge shapes the intelligence.
Your practice strengths, client relationships, issue frameworks, and ways of exercising professional judgment.
Your approved research, precedents, matter evidence, and information-access boundaries.
Your citation standards, confidentiality rules, review responsibilities, and approach to client service.
Prototype, codebase, and system-design work informs our approach to legal data, documents, and research workflows. This evidence is not a claim of a deployed client legal platform.
Production engineering experience
Experience carrying complex systems into operation
Our engineering experience includes role-based applications, relational data, integrations, controlled releases, investigation, and continuing production support. Industry-specific applications are scoped separately.
Your Tailored Preview
We bring the first map.
We study your public practice profile and bring nine possibilities with one worked example before we meet. Your professionals test the client relevance and reasoning. We revisit the tools and evidence, then return with a refined Preview and one or two practical capabilities that could strengthen or extend the firm.
Professionals review the work and retain legal judgment. Offered applications are not legal advice, outcome predictions, or claims of a deployed legal platform. Data rights, access controls, confidentiality, and source coverage are defined for each engagement.
Across your business
Let clients benefit from more of what the firm knows.
Explore the connected business context
A lower cost of initial diligence can open a wider set of matters to investigation. Reusable practice knowledge can support a new client service. We bring specific possibilities and tool foundations, then test the evidence, full effort, and commercial case with your professionals.
Your knowledge, relationships, and judgment may support more than you can see today. We bring the first possibilities. Together, we find a direction worth pursuing.