Independent AI advisory for small law firms. Assessed, built, and managed.
Salvis helps small law firms adopt AI without compromising client confidentiality. We examine how a firm works in practice, establish which tools would repay their cost, and determine where client information travels once those tools are in use. What survives that review, we build and maintain.
Request an assessment- Unwritten
- Governed
- Integrated
- Compounding
Adoption assumes a staff most firms do not have.
Use of generative AI in legal organizations rose from 14% to 26% within a single year.Thomson Reuters Institute, 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services. 1,702 respondents across legal, tax and accounting, risk, and government, surveyed January to February 2025. Figures are the legal cut: 26% said their organization was already using generative AI, against 14% in the 2024 edition — 28% among law firms, 23% among corporate legal departments. Distinct from the report's all-industry figures, which include a separate 26% reporting wide-scale rollout. That figure describes the profession in aggregate, and the aggregate conceals the firms that constitute most of it. A four-attorney practice confronts the same decision as a four-hundred-attorney one, but reaches it without an IT department, an innovation committee, or anyone whose week has room to evaluate software.
The absence produces two patterns. In some firms an associate or a paralegal finds a tool that works, begins using it on client matters, and the firm learns of it afterward. In others nothing happens for a year, because the partner who would have to choose among forty competing products has no reliable basis on which to choose.
The survey data reflects both. Among law firms, 30% have a policy written specifically for AI, a further 11% cover it under a general technology policy, and 40% offer any generative-AI training at all.Thomson Reuters Institute, 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services, Figures 25 and 26, law firm cut; 48% of law firms reported no policy of any kind. The training figure measures whether a firm makes generative-AI training available, not whether anyone was trained on its policy. ILTA's 2025 Technology Survey — 580 firms averaging some 262 attorneys each, so a mid- and large-firm sample — found 45% saying "we have an official policy and only permit use of vetted / sanctioned tools and applications." Firms of that size carry the IT staff a small practice does not, and still land at 45%. 8am, 2026 Legal Industry Report (March 2026), surveying 1,300+ legal professionals in September and October 2025: 43% said their firm has no formal AI policy and no plans to create one, 24% are developing one, and 9% have one in place and actively enforce it.
The constraint is rarely willingness. Most of the attorneys we speak with are willing, and several already pay for tools they have no means of evaluating. What they lack is someone to determine which products withstand use on real matters, what each would cost to operate once installed, and where the profession's confidentiality obligations narrow the choice. Those are questions of capacity rather than of interest, and a firm of this size resolves questions of capacity by retaining someone to answer them.
Firms sit in one of four places.
The four describe where a firm stands. None of them is a grade, and the appropriate next step differs materially between them. Prescribing before establishing which one applies is how a firm acquires software that nobody opens. Above the first threshold we rank the work consistently, by the largest return for the least disruption. Below that threshold, ranking by return is premature.
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I
Unwritten
Nothing about AI has been decided.
Firms at this stage differ widely in practice. Some use AI daily; others use none of it and remain uncertain what it would accomplish for them. They occupy the same position because neither has determined which tools the firm permits, who may use them, or what information may be entered into them. Where those questions go unanswered, each person answers them privately, and the answers do not agree.
To cross out of it: establish what is already in use, decide what the firm will standardize on, and record the boundary where staff can find it. The work is narrower than most firms anticipate.
Then the first hour goes to an inventory, including the tools nobody has mentioned yet. If the firm uses nothing, that hour is shorter and the question becomes which one or two tasks are worth beginning with. In either case we want an accurate picture before anyone plans against it.
Noted on the form below
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The floor
Nothing gets built above this line.
A firm that cannot identify the tools it uses cannot account for where a client's information has gone. Formal Opinion 512 and Texas Opinion 705 both proceed from the assumption that it can.3 This work therefore precedes everything above it, whatever it would otherwise rank on return, and it is ordinarily the least expensive and quickest item on the list.
3 ABA Comm. on Ethics & Prof'l Responsibility, Formal Op. 512 (2024); Prof'l Ethics Comm. for the State Bar of Tex., Op. 705 (2025). On vendor diligence specifically, see also ABA Comm. on Ethics & Prof'l Responsibility, Formal Op. 477R (2017). What these require, in plain terms.
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II
Governed
Decisions made, tools chosen, a boundary the staff knows.
The firm can state what it uses, what it declines to use, and on what basis. Most firms that reach this point stop, because the concern that prompted the work has been addressed. The exposure is closed and none of the return has yet arrived; that begins at the third stage.
To move up: place the chosen tools inside the work rather than alongside it.
Then the question is whether the policy survives contact with the work. We look at whether the approved tools are the ones people actually reach for, and where the workarounds have formed. Every policy is worked around somewhere; what matters is whether the workaround reopens the exposure the policy was written to close.
Noted on the form below
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III
Integrated
AI sits inside intake, drafting, and the matter record.
The work passes through the tools rather than around them, so no one has to remember to open a separate window. Time recovered at this stage appears on a timesheet within a week. Most of the building occurs here, and most of it consists of connecting to Clio or MyCase, which stay where they are.
To move up: measure what the arrangement returns, and assign someone to it when the measurements drift.
Then the build is largely complete and the question is whether it is holding. We look at what is measured, what has drifted, and which parts of the workflow have quietly reverted to the earlier method. Integration decays, and it ordinarily decays for some time before anyone notices.
Noted on the form below
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IV
Compounding
The firm applies the time it recovers and can show what that was worth.
Few firms arrive here without intending to. Most acquire efficiency they never convert, because the binding constraint was never the hours available but the volume of work arriving. A firm at this stage knows what it recovered and has somewhere to apply it.
There is no fifth stage. The remaining work is holding the firm at this one.
Then you probably do not need us for the build, and we would say so on the first call. What merits an outside review is whether governance kept pace with integration. Firms that move quickly at the third stage frequently leave the policy at the second, and that is the gap we would be looking for.
Noted on the form below
Thirty minutes, at no charge.
We examine how the firm operates now, establish which of the four stages describes it, and set out what the next step would be worth. Firms that have adopted nothing are the most straightforward of these. The result is written, and it is yours whether or not the engagement continues.
If the findings do not warrant action, we will say so. We neither resell software nor accept referral fees, so where the correct recommendation is a product we have no relationship with, that is the recommendation you receive.
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The call
Thirty minutes on how the firm operates: where the time goes, what software it already pays for, and what anyone has attempted so far. Nothing to prepare, and "we have not started" is a complete answer.
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The page
Which of the four stages describes the firm, what the first step would be, and what it would require. One page, written, and yours to keep or to circulate to a partner.
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Then nothing
Unless you ask. We follow up once. If the page proves useful on its own and the firm builds from it without us, that is a satisfactory outcome. The page is yours either way.