Many tools, none of them connected.
Legal work crosses the document system, the inbox, Word, research sources, and practice management. Point tools each cover one task, and the business of the firm is left to spreadsheets.
Industries · Legal: Governed AI for Firms & In-House Counsel
One platform for the practice and business of the firm
Attorneys, business teams, and clients on one governed platform with citations on every claim and an author on every change.
A market alert. A company pull. A working memo in the inbox in 10 to 15 minutes.
Citations on every claimAttribution on every editDocument permissions inheritedRuns in your environment
What customers say
“The tools have way more capacity than we have the mindset to maximize them at this stage, but, you know, that's a good problem to have.”
“I finally got a chance to play around with the computer asset and build out the chatbot you mentioned. It was really impressive.”
“So we use the SDK, and we write that in Python, and it calls Athena majority by API. The results appear in the interface itself.”
“Obviously, you guys have really good security. We trust you guys with your security of what we do.”
“Does look pretty much very impressive compared to everything else that we're exploring.”
“You guys have a lot more control because you guys own the interface.”
“They're biggest customer now by far because they're like, we can scale this up now and get whatever we want.”
“It's good to understand the capability of the platform. That how far, and how quickly you guys can get these things going [...] that has been impressive overall.”
“Lets us get a lot more out of our data than [...] We can sit on top of all of the data in [our data warehouse] as opposed to just, like, our little ingested, you know, three gigabytes semantic models. I think we have a lot of power here.”
“Gave Athena the spreadsheet, explained which column I was trying to figure out, and then ten secs it told me... exactly how the calculation was based on the other data.”
Verbatim from customer calls. Customers anonymized.
Challenges
What Legal (firms & in-house) has to get right
Citations and attribution are not optional.
Every claim needs a source and every change needs an author. That requirement should be built into the platform, not left to a checklist.
Clients and lawyers need different access.
Lawyers work with their own document and email permissions; clients need a clear, secure place to share and track matters.
Use cases by team
What an Amlaw 100 Firm runs on Athena
LitigationCitation checking, research, and first drafts, with lawyers reviewing exceptions instead of every cite.
Citation checking
Every citation in a brief verified against the source, with overruled or superseded authority flagged. Lawyers review only the exceptions.
Alert-to-memo
A market or legal alert triggers research and a memo on your template, with sources attached, routed to a reviewer.
Regulatory and docket monitoring
Agency, court, and docket sources checked on a schedule, with digests that carry the source and retrieval time.
Business development & marketingMarket research, pitch preparation, and media monitoring, all cited.
Market maps and monitoring
Market and legal sources pulled on a schedule into market maps and media feeds, each entry cited and timestamped.
Pitch preparation
Company and contact research from your CRM, approved sources, and firm files; outreach drafted and held for approval.
Finance & billingTime, billing, and matter reporting that builds itself.
Time and unbilled reporting
Weekly time and unbilled reports built from your practice management data with your firm's definitions, checked by a reviewer before distribution.
Bill review and allocation
Invoices and disbursements allocated across matters, with a bill-review workflow and a clear record of every decision.
Knowledge managementFirm knowledge answered with sources, for people who never log in.
Knowledge Q&A applications
Question-and-answer applications over your firm's materials, with answers by email for people who never open the app.
Conflicts and entity mapping
Entity relationships drawn from documents to support conflicts review, read with each person's permissions and filed back with attribution.
Firm leadership & operationsFirm financial operations automated with every assumption attributed.
Firm financial modeling
Financial operations that took days handled largely by the system, with every assumption change attributed and reversible.
Usage and cost by practice
Usage, cost, and output tracked by practice group, with hard budgets on every run.
Clients & firm-wideA branded assistant for everyone at the firm and portals for clients.
Firm-wide assistant
A white-labeled assistant for every lawyer and staff member through single sign-on, with each person's email, document, and data permissions inherited live.
Client portals
Uploads, read receipts, and live matter status for clients. The portal separates uploading from submitting and submitting from acceptance.
Related story
From a folder of motions to a citation-checked brief
- Before
An associate checks every citation in a brief by hand the night before filing. Overruled authority slips through anyway. Every cite opened, the underlying case pulled, the citator result recorded. An all-nighter for a brief with dozens of citations.
- What we did
An email-triggered Agent Operating Procedure (AOP), a versioned written procedure Athena runs. Paste the brief or upload the folder. Every cite verified, the underlying case pulled, overruled or superseded authority flagged. A review document with only the exceptions for a human. The rest is confirmed with a link to the source. An AmLaw 100 firm runs it from the litigators' inbox.
- After
A review document with only the exceptions for a human. The rest is confirmed with a link to the source. The associate spends the night on argument instead of checking citations. The citation panel: 41 confirmed, 3 flagged. The firm files with confidence.
What to plan for
Public case-law search in our reference build uses public authority; it does not demonstrate comprehensive legal-database coverage and does not replace an attorney's validation. Connect your licensed research databases for comprehensive coverage. It flags; a lawyer decides.
Example workflow
Market alert to reviewed memo in minutes
Integrations
The systems Legal (firms & in-house) already runs
Legal work crosses the document system, the inbox, Word, research sources, and practice management. Athena connects them with each person's own permissions.
Documents & email
Document management systemOutlookWordFirm templates
Research & dockets
Approved research sourcesCourt docketsRegulatory sources
Firm data
Practice managementTime and billingCRMSQL databases
Market intelligence
Market dataNews and media sources
Security and compliance
What your security review will ask
Set the boundaries before the first run. Choose the deployment, approved sources, and allowed actions with your IT and security teams.
Managed cloud or your own environment
Athena supports managed-cloud and customer-environment deployments. Source-system permissions inherited. Configurable tool approvals.
Discovery-aware retention with hard delete
Discovery-aware retention; hard delete on schedule. Document the data handling for the connectors and model providers you enable.
Citations on every claim
A citation on every claim in every memo, digest, and report. The reviewer can inspect the supporting passage rather than reconstruct the research.
Attribution on every edit
Every save stamped with the author, human or agent, plus the session and message that caused it. Open the Activity Monitor to see what changed and who changed it.
Clients use portals, included in Athena services
External clients can use deployed portals without individual Athena licenses. Deployment and usage terms still apply.
What to plan for
Public case-law search in our reference build uses public authority; it does not demonstrate comprehensive legal-database coverage and does not replace an attorney's validation. Connect your licensed sources.
For every stakeholder
Answers for everyone who signs off
Where does Athena help the firm first?
Most firms start with one recurring task, such as citation checking, a monitoring digest, or a billing report, and expand from there on the same platform.
Where does the data live and who can see it?
Documents stay in your document system and are read with each person's own permissions. Deploy in our cloud or your environment, with retention and deletion on your schedule.
Does this replace a lawyer's judgment?
No. Athena prepares drafts, checks citations, and monitors sources; a lawyer reviews before anything becomes advice or is sent.
How are lawyers and clients given access?
A firm-wide assistant through single sign-on, and client portals for external users, with access included in Athena services.
FAQ
What can AI agents do for a law firm or legal department?
They support both the practice and the business: checking citations, monitoring regulatory and court sources, drafting on your templates, answering knowledge questions, and producing billing and management reports.
Do agents replace a lawyer's judgment?
No. Agents prepare and check; a lawyer reviews before anything becomes advice or is sent.
How is client confidentiality protected?
Agents work with each person's own document and email permissions, every action is logged, and retention follows your policies. Athena can run in your own environment.
Can clients benefit directly?
Yes. Firms offer client portals and branded assistants, with access included in Athena services.
Where should we start?
With one recurring task that has a clear standard of done, such as a citation check, a monitoring digest, or a weekly report.
One platform underneath
AGS · Athena Governance System
Records every change by a person or an agent, rolls back one contributor's edits without losing anyone else's, and keeps the model, instructions, and sources behind each agent action.
Palladium · deployment
How the platform is deployed: Athena's managed cloud, your cloud on AWS, GCP, or Azure, on-prem, air-gapped, or GovCloud. Same platform in every option.
How it fits together
Build, Work, and Data on top; 150+ connectors and every surface in and out; one map of the whole platform.
Related
Athena Library
Run this on a schedule
Ready-made legal briefs you can run on a schedule.
Start with one finished output.
Bring a recurring task, a sample input, and an example of work your team would accept. We will scope the workflow with you and agree the review points.
Citations on every claimAttribution on every editDocument permissions inheritedRuns in your environment