Operating systems for professional service firms
We redesign how professional service firms operate.
Counsel Code maps how law, accounting and consulting firms actually work, then rebuilds the machinery underneath — with AI, automation and custom software.
We write the software ourselves, and you own it.
The problem
Most firms run on decades-old machinery.
Partners and owners spend thousands of hours every year on work software should be doing.
Most firms don't see the cost. They assume that's just how business works.
It isn't. AI, automation, and custom software have permanently changed what's possible.
Where the hours go:
- Document preparation
- Email drafting
- Client intake
- Scheduling
- Billing
- Reporting
- CRM upkeep
- Internal communication
- Knowledge management
- Repetitive legal work
- Repetitive accounting work
- Administrative follow-up
Services
Organized by outcome, not technology.
Sometimes the answer is AI. Sometimes automation. Sometimes custom software. Sometimes removing a workflow entirely. We choose the medium after we understand the machine.
01
Operational Assessment
A complete map of how your firm actually works, and where it loses time.
02
Custom Software
Applications built to fit one operation exactly. We design them and we write them.
03
AI Implementation
AI applied to real tasks — drafting, review, extraction, classification — with a human holding the pen.
04
Automation Engineering
Repetitive work handled by systems instead of staff — including the parts that fail.
05
Systems Integration
The systems you already own, made to agree with each other.
06
Reporting & Analytics
The numbers that run the firm — and a check on whether they are true.
Results
Real implementations. Measurable outcomes.
These systems run inside real businesses today. The numbers below are from live operations, not projections.
45 min → 3 min
Document preparation time at a growing law firm
70%
Of manual client intake eliminated
Thousands
Of repetitive administrative tasks automated
Case study
Buchanan Law Group: seven systems in six months.
A Chicago family law firm running on a legacy CRM, a rented scheduling tool, a third-party automation layer and a large amount of manual reconciliation. No single system knew what a case cost, what had been promised to a client, or what was due in court tomorrow.
We did not buy software and configure it. We mapped how the firm actually operates and rebuilt the machinery underneath it, one system at a time, each one in production before the next began.
The firm ran its pipeline across a legacy CRM, spreadsheets and people's memory. Lead Tracker took all of it: every call, quote, appointment and payment, from the first ad click to the signed agreement. Follow-up that used to depend on someone remembering now runs on a schedule.
187 screens · 100 scheduled jobs · Ad spend tied to signed clients
Read the case study →The legal side of the firm — matters, court dates, orders, documents, billable time. It absorbed a decade of records from two systems, then took over the court-day jobs that a third-party automation platform had been running, so that platform could be switched off.
2,537 matters · 8,946 hearings · 25 assistant tools
Read the case study →A replacement for the off-the-shelf scheduling tool the firm rented. Round-robin, sequential fill and whole-team booking, each person's own calendar connected, reschedules and cancellations handled without a support ticket.
Replaced a paid SaaS seat per person · 19 staff calendars · Own domain
Read the case study →Every text to and from the firm's main number, stored once and routed to whichever system needs it. Before a message goes out it asks whether that client has opted out — and if it cannot get an answer, it sends nothing. A delayed text is recoverable. A text to someone who asked you to stop is not.
One number, three destinations · Fails closed by design · Full message history
Read the case study →Card, eCheck, bank transfer, peer-to-peer and paper checks all arrived differently and were reconciled by hand. The hub ingests all five, matches the payer to the right client — the payer is frequently not the client — and hands one clean event to everything downstream.
5 payment methods · Nightly reconciliation · Replaced manual allocation
Read the case study →The firm quoted flat fees against a blended average cost per case. We rebuilt that number from the underlying billing records and found it had been drawn from the wrong population — it understated the real figure by about 70% and hid a threefold spread between case types. It also showed the exposure was never the price. It was the term: most cases are still billing long after a four-month fee would have run out.
2,559 matters analysed · Benchmark understated ~70% · Repriced the term, not the fee
Read the case study →Invoicing ran on a general-purpose work platform the firm had long outgrown, with the ledger reconciled by hand every cycle. MatterCounts takes it in-house: time and expenses, trust and retainer balances, an invoice approval queue, and delivery to the client by email and text with the account summary attached. It runs alongside the old system until every number agrees.
Invoice approval queue · Email + SMS delivery · Retires the last rented platform
Read the case study →Six are in daily use. The seventh is replacing the last of the old stack now. When it lands, the firm owns every system it runs on.
Our approach
Every business is a machine.
Most are assembled over years. New software gets bolted onto old software. Processes accumulate. Exceptions multiply. Employees compensate. Eventually nobody understands the entire system.
How we work →The output is not software.
The output is a dramatically better business.
Who this is for
Professional service firms of 10 to 250 people. Owner-led, growing, profitable — and paying expensive professionals to do work a system should be doing.
Who we serve →Next step
Book an Operational Strategy Call.
Thirty minutes about how your firm actually operates, an honest read on where the friction lives, and a clear recommendation — with numbers, not adjectives. If we are not the right fit, we will tell you.
Request a call