The Bet Behind a 20-Lawyer Firm

Dunning Vallejo & MacDonald has built its practice on the belief that clients receive the same—if not better—service from a boutique law firm, not despite its size, but because of it. August is a perfect example of why that bet continues to pay off, helping the firm consistently outperform competitors many times its size.

When Brian Dunning and his partners founded Dunning Vallejo & MacDonald in 2019, they were not trying to build a smaller version of the big New York firms they came from. They were pursuing a different model.

"The idea was that we wanted to be able to give our clients large firm style service quality, but to do it in a small firm environment where clients would have direct access to partners," says Brian, who spent his entire career at large New York firms before diverging from that model. "My partners and I realized that we could do what we were doing on our own, probably make more or less the same amount of money, and our clients would be a lot happier with us."

The firm started as a dispute resolution boutique and grew into a full-service practice as its international clients needed more: M&A, corporate finance, U.S. and transnational litigation, commercial and investor-state arbitration. "The idea was to bring that sophistication and those technical capabilities to a much smaller outfit," says Damián Vallejo, name partner. He is candid about the catch: "We don't have large infrastructure or a very large team, so in many cases we need to rely on certain tools rather than relying on more lawyers by headcount."

That is the tension every serious boutique lives with. The work that walks in the door does not know you have 20 lawyers.

A Million Documents Was the Old Normal

Marta González-Ruano, a litigation associate at DVM, describes what that tension used to feel like. "Sometimes we receive a million documents, because we want to take as much documentation from the client as possible, and we're the ones filtering what's important and helpful for the case." Before August, that meant "spending weeks and weeks going through documents and tagging them as helpful or not, responsive or not, confidential or not, manually." It was where most of her time went, and most of the client's budget.

Now she uploads the documents into August with a prompt describing the case and how she wants things labeled. "Within minutes I get everything organized into folders instead of a million unmanageable documents." She can question the folders directly, which changed her relationship with clients too: "A lot of times we'd ask questions that were actually answered in a document they'd sent us, but it took so long to find. Now I can directly ask August who a person is. I feel I'm bothering the client less than before."

Brian saw the same math on a matter his team is handling now. "We used August in this particular case to run through many hundreds of thousands of documents to identify the documents we were going to need for the case, and we probably saved ourselves a month of work and the client probably a few hundred thousand dollars."

Ramon Gomez, a foreign associate on DVM's international arbitration team, lived the before and after on his first brief for a case, where the client shared what he describes as a database of over 4,000 internal documents: Word files, spreadsheets, PDFs, endless emails. "We had digital platforms to help us view them one by one, but at the end of the day it was us, the humans, going one by one." Done the old way, he says, it "would have taken a lot of time, and a lot of money for the client, a lot of associate-level hours." With August handling the first pass instead, the math changed: "It allows us to allocate time and resources better. We use time more efficiently now and focus on actual lawyer work. That time-saving factor is huge with August."

From Sorting the Record to Drafting the Testimony

Document review is where the trust started, but not where it stayed.

DVM can now interview witnesses over videocall, transcribe the meetings, and upload the transcript into August to produce a summary of the meeting and even a first draft of a witness testimony. "The first drafts are, instead of the mess that is a conversation, a logical explanation of the witness's testimony on a particular and sometimes very technical subject," Brian says. Work that used to take days now starts with a serious head start, and the lawyers spend their hours verifying accuracy with the witnesses rather than untangling spoken language into written order. All of this is backed by the assurance that information shared with August remains entirely confidential, is never used to train the underlying models, and safeguards the attorney-client privilege to the highest standard.

Marta runs the same play from the associate's chair, uploading an interview transcript alongside the full document set. "It gives a nice, sometimes 30-page document referencing everything, which I can check for accuracy, review myself, change some things, add footnotes. Just having that first draft instead of facing a blank document is extremely helpful, and I'd say it even does a more accurate job than I could do alone."

For Ramon, the escalation was personal before it was professional. "At first I was a little scared that August would take my work, but that's not the case. It makes me a better lawyer." He uses it to sharpen his own drafting: "A better writer too."

What the Hours Buy Now

Ask the partners what all the reclaimed time is for, and the answer is not more documents. The hours that once vanished into review now go into the judgment work a boutique sells: choosing which arguments to lead with, which claims to drop, how to shape a record rather than just assemble one. Brian sees the change in his associates' output, and just as clearly in their evenings. "Things that used to take them until 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night don't anymore," he says, which he counts as a direct contribution to the firm's culture.

The savings arrive before a matter even opens. Case assessment, when the firm decides whether a dispute is worth pursuing and how to price it, was some of the slowest and least billable work in the building, and for a 20-lawyer shop it effectively rations which fights the firm can afford to take on. "Instead of spending weeks or months analyzing a matter's viability, we've reduced that time significantly through August," Damian says.

What keeps the firm committed, though, is less the tool than the people behind it. "We just feel like somebody has our backs," Brian says. "We aren't just left to use a tool with no backup. We can rely on August to help us when we run up against something that's complicated or we just don't understand."

The Small-Firm Thesis, Compounded

Seven years in, the founding bet looks better than it did on day one, and the partners think they know why. "AI in particular is a force multiplier," Brian says. "It lets a firm of less than 20 lawyers compete with firms that have hundreds of lawyers." His advice to boutiques still deliberating: "It's not even a close call. You have to have it to compete in New York City and the United States these days, because the other firms are just going to leave you in their dust if you don't figure out how to use it."

Damián sees the market moving toward firms built like his. "Clients are now also looking at firms our size for more sophisticated work, and I think that's a trend that will continue over the next few years, where larger, more sophisticated matters start going even more to smaller firms like ours."

Marta no longer thinks about the size gap at all. "We're a boutique firm and often work against big firms also using AI, but with August we don't feel any disadvantage from being a boutique."

She puts the whole thing in two sentences: "The work hasn't changed. How we get there has."