What's Next
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For law firms & legal

More billable hours, less legal admin.

Lawyers bill by the hour. We build AI agents that take the repetitive first pass on intake, document review and precedent search, with every output kept under a lawyer’s review.

Law firms · In-house legal · Notaries

The challenge

Expertise is billed by the hour, and admin eats it.

Intake is slow and leaky

New-client enquiries arrive by phone, form and email at all hours, and the good ones cool off before anyone qualifies them. Conflict checks and first questions sit until a fee earner has time, so promising matters slip.

Document review burns billable time

Contracts, bundles and disclosure run to hundreds of pages, and the first pass, finding the clauses, dates and risks, falls on expensive people. The same review patterns get repeated by hand on every matter.

Knowledge is locked in matters and minds

Past advice, templates and precedents sit across closed files and individual inboxes, so the same research gets redone and juniors interrupt seniors all day. When a key lawyer is out, the firm’s know-how is effectively unavailable.

How we work

Live in weeks, not quarters.

  1. 01

    DiscoveryWeek 1

    We map your workflow on your real data and pick the highest-ROI use case to ship first.

  2. 02

    DesignWeek 1–2

    We design the agent around your tools and guardrails, and prove it on a working prototype.

  3. 03

    BuildWeek 2–4

    We build it as real engineering: integrated, tested, with logging and human escalation.

  4. 04

    Launch & ownOngoing

    We deploy into your stack, hand over the code and docs, and tune it live with your team.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Can I trust an AI not to get the law wrong?

The agent works from your own documents, precedents and checklists, not free-floating general knowledge, and cites the source for every answer so a lawyer can verify in seconds. It flags uncertainty and escalates rather than guesses, and document review and advice always stay under a fee earner’s review. It removes the first-pass grind; it does not replace professional judgement.

How are client confidentiality and privilege protected?

Data is processed on EU infrastructure under a data-processing agreement, scoped to only the matters and systems a use case needs, and never used to train shared public models. Access follows your existing permissions, and you keep full control over retention and what the agent can see.

Which work should we automate first?

Most firms start with intake or document review, the highest-volume, most repetitive work where the payback is obvious. We scope one workflow, connect it to your real systems and prove it on live matters before expanding.

How long until something is live?

A first use case is typically live in 2 to 4 weeks. We connect it to your practice-management, document and intake tools, pilot on a slice of real work, and confirm the quality before widening its autonomy.

Will it work with our practice-management and document systems?

Yes. We build on top of the tools you already run rather than asking you to switch, connecting through their APIs to read your documents, route intake and book into your diaries. If you have an unusual or older internal system, we can usually integrate with it too.

Do we own what you build?

Completely. You own the prompts, workflows and configuration, we document them so there is no lock-in, and it runs on infrastructure you control. It is your system, that you keep and extend long after we hand it over.

Axel Dekker, founder of What's Next

Put AI to work in your firm.

See where AI safely fits in your intake and document work, in a free 30-minute call.