Answer · Cost
What does AI governance for a law firm cost?
The answer
An AI governance review for a law firm costs from £1,850 a day at Occam, and a typical review runs between six and fifteen days, so most firms should budget between about £11,000 and £28,000. The number moves with the length of the workflow list, not the size of the firm. A practice that wants three workflows cleared, say document summarisation, first-draft correspondence and internal research, sits at the short end. A multi-office firm with a dozen candidate uses, several data paths and a regulator to answer to sits at the long end. The output is a written position for each workflow: what may run, on which tool, with which data, and what evidence trail the partners can produce if asked. Some workflows fail the review, and the fee covers saying so in writing.
What decides whether the review takes six days or fifteen?
The length of the workflow list, and how many distinct data paths sit behind it.
Each workflow the firm wants cleared has to be looked at on its own: what goes in, which tool and which tier of that tool, where the output goes, who checks it, and what a client or the regulator would expect to see if they asked. Three workflows on one tool with one data path is a short review. Twelve workflows across two tools, three offices and a mix of consumer and enterprise accounts is a long one.
Firms sometimes shorten the review by removing workflows nobody is prepared to defend before the work starts. That is a sensible use of the first conversation, and it costs nothing.
What do you get for the fee?
A written position for every workflow on the list, signed by a named person at the firm and drafted by us.
Each position says whether the workflow may run, on which tool and tier, with which categories of data allowed and excluded, with what retention setting, and with which human check before anything leaves the firm. Where a workflow fails, the position says why and what would have to change for it to pass. The set of positions is the evidence trail: a partner asked by a client or a regulator can produce a page rather than a recollection.
The review also produces a short list of what the firm should not attempt yet, which is often the most useful page of the lot. The service page for AI Governance and Assurance sets out the scope in full.
What does the review not cover?
Legal advice, a generic policy document, and approval of tools the firm has already bought.
The review is not a legal opinion on the firm's regulatory duties. It is a practical position on which uses of which tools the firm can defend, written so that the firm's own compliance lead or external adviser can check it. A one-page policy that says staff should use AI responsibly is not the output either, because nobody can act on it.
Tools already in use are reviewed like any other, and some will fail. If the firm wants a stamp on a purchase it has already made, we are not the right people, and we say so before the engagement starts rather than after.
How does the cost compare with doing nothing?
Doing nothing usually means the firm is already running an unwritten version of the review, badly.
Fee earners are pasting client material into consumer accounts because nobody has said which tool is permitted. The firm's exposure exists whether or not a review has been commissioned; the review only makes it visible and bounded. A multi-office accountancy group in a comparable position is described in Partners who wanted AI they could defend, where several workflows were declined in writing and the rest cleared for use.
Price bands for the review and for the build work that sometimes follows it sit on Pricing. Where a workflow passes and the firm wants it built into daily work, that is a separate engagement under AI Operations.