Assembly Software saves law firms up to 25 hours per case with Azure

With pressure mounting to meet rising client expectations, law firms are discovering that traditional tools, siloed systems, and manual workflows are no longer sufficient. Assembly Software is focused on developing software to support legal professionals, delivering scalable, secure, and configurable solutions that streamline legal workflows and unlock new levels of productivity.

“We know people in the legal sector often work long hours and face high stress,” says McKay Ferrell, SVP of Products at Assembly Software. “We’re committed to helping them be more efficient and productive through technology.”

Legal case management is particularly time-consuming and complex. Tasks include creating and maintaining client profiles, drafting legal communications, reviewing extensive documents, and tracking expenses. Firms also need to ensure privacy and compliance while adhering to strict deadlines. “We wanted to find more ways to ease the burden and give back time to attorneys and their staff so they can serve more clients,” explains Ferrell.

The Assembly Software team recognized that a generative AI solution could automate many of these legal tasks and deliver significant efficiency gains. The team envisioned a fully embedded generative AI solution to securely automate nearly every aspect of the legal workflow, from document receipt to data extraction and automated entry, all the way to document generation and performance reporting.

Establishing a foundation

“As a Microsoft shop that uses Azure, we trust Azure AI Foundry as a comprehensive platform for designing, customizing, and managing AI solutions. It was ideal for us because it’s scalable and provides the robust security and compliance the legal industry demands,” says James Garrett, CTO at Assembly Software.

With Azure AI Foundry, Assembly Software knew it could simplify AI development processes and workflows and create a solution to handle its customers’ critical needs. Requirements for the solution, called NeosAI, included capabilities for easy document generation. These abilities encompassed generating abstractive and extractive document summaries, intelligent data extraction, optical character recognition (OCR), and dynamic forms.

To prepare the team for a successful build, Assembly Software provided all its engineers with GitHub Copilot licenses. “GitHub Copilot significantly improved our productivity,” says Rick Cirigliano, CPO at Assembly Software. “Our developers can write and execute code more efficiently with real-time code suggestions and code structure completion in GitHub Copilot.” This helped accelerate project deployment, ensure adherence to best practices, and produce error-free code.

Building NeosAI

By using Azure DevOps, NeosAI developers can track code changes, build applications, and support a seamless deployment pipeline. The NeosAI user interface (UI), built with React, is hosted on Azure Content Delivery Network for quick loading and availability. The React UI communicates with back-end services via APIs written in .NET 8, hosted on Azure App Service and Azure Functions, enabling real-time responses and efficient workflow handling.

“NeosAI is designed to handle a high volume of transactions, achieving an impressive average response time of 67.2 milliseconds across 4.2 million transactions per hour,” says Garrett. “This performance is directly related to the effectiveness of the capabilities of Azure, including load balancing and failover strategies.” Cirigliano adds, “We do our own monitoring of the DTU (database transaction unit) and utilize Azure management APIs to upscale and downscale.”

Azure App Service helps NeosAI run web applications, mobile applications, and microservices. “Azure App Service helps our developers focus more on their application and less on the underlying infrastructure, enhancing productivity and efficiency,” explains Ferrell.

The back end consists of multiple Azure services, helping ensure high availability and scalability. According to Garrett, the team uses Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB for data management, optimizing performance and response times. Azure Cosmos DB is used for US-distributed cross-tenant data structures and rapid response times, specifically for components like Neos Activity Feed and Notifications. “The regional availability and multi-region read-and-write capabilities of Azure Cosmos DB help us ensure low latency and high availability, making it ideal for handling hot data,” Garrett says.

Efficiency through AI automation

Cirigliano says Azure AI services plays a pivotal role in supporting NeosAI. He explains, “We merged Azure AI Foundry into workflows, rather than introducing it as a separate module, making it a seamless part of the users’ experiences.” This supports users in easily creating tailored case communications. It also drives an interactive chat function that gives NeosAI the ability to provide interactive and intelligent responses to user queries on both document generation and interrogation.

“One of the most time-consuming tasks for our customers is searching through documents for critical information pertaining to their cases,” says Ferrell. “We used Azure AI Search for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to support contextual searches, ensuring NeosAI can easily retrieve relevant information from large datasets, saving firms a significant amount of time.”

Cirigliano adds that the average big law firm bills at rates ranging from $500 to $1,000 per hour. Therefore, the time savings provided by Azure AI Search can translate into substantial financial savings for these firms.

Assembly Software used Azure AI Document Intelligence to help NeosAI automate extraction of information from a variety of documents, including forms, photo IDs, invoices, and receipts. Azure AI Vision for OCR easily pulls text from images. This reduces the need for manual data entry and helps ensure that information is captured accurately. Ferrell adds that with Azure AI Speech, NeosAI will soon be able to transcribe and analyze spoken language for legal documents and communications, which further supports accuracy and speeds document processing.

Enhanced privacy and security

NeosAI prioritizes the privacy and security of user data, ensuring that firm data is not shared with other Assembly Software customers or Microsoft Azure services. Assembly Software also uses Microsoft Defender as part of its security suite. 

Named entity extraction and personal data extraction help identify and extract specific entities and personal data from documents, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations. This is crucial for maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive information. In addition, says Cirigliano, “The AI models we use through Azure help ensure a zero data retention policy for data passed through NeosAI APIs.” Upon generating and sending back a response, the input data is immediately deleted.

Massive time savings, efficiency gains

Deployed in under six months, NeosAI simplifies legal workflows and saves firms time and resources. Features like document drafting automation, speedy document review, and efficient information retrieval help law firms reduce errors and inconsistencies. Documents are processed quickly and accurately, reducing manual data entry.

“By eliminating data entry, there are fewer accuracy issues. It’s improving expense tracking and optimizing firm performance,” says Ferrell. With their newfound efficiency, legal teams can spend more time on their clients.

Assembly Software customers report that NeosAI saves them up to 25 hours per case on manual data entry, document generation, and review. It has cut the time required to draft legal documents from 40 hours to mere minutes. 

Ferrell adds that NeosAI has, on average, given Assembly Software customers efficiency gains equivalent to approximately two full-time equivalents (FTEs) for a legal team with 20 users over the course of a year. The outcome translates to about a 10% gain. “This is significant for firms that are more interested in growth and productivity savings than cutting staff,” says Ferrell.

With the growing adoption of NeosAI by law firms in the United States, Assembly Software is exploring ways to expand NeosAI’s reach. Concludes Garrett, “Thanks to the solid foundation of Azure AI, databases, and apps, we have the ability to continually innovate and adapt the platform to meet the specific legal requirements of different regions around the world, paving the way for future AI advancements and global expansion.”

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