Introducing August Products
August Products lets a law firm turn a legal service into a product its clients can buy, delivered by the firm’s own agents and reviewed by its lawyers.
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AUGUST / PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT
Law firms have been trying to sell legal services as products for more than a decade. Allen & Overy built AOSphere on rules-based systems and document automation long before generative AI arrived. Now, agents can take that approach much further, drafting work from a firm’s own precedents and playbooks. A service built once can then become a recurring source of revenue, usually sold at a fixed fee.
Today we are launching August Products. The firm decides what to sell, and August builds the client-facing application and connects it to a firm’s agent. Lawyers can stay in the loop, reviewing the work at points the firm chooses.
How August Products works
Clients see a site in the firm’s branding, where they sign in, submit their documents and receive the finished work. Behind it, the firm’s lawyers check the agents’ output in a review interface inside August. A firm can start from August’s library of hundreds of pre-built agents, which dozens of firms already use, and adapt one to its own practice.
“Law firms can now earn recurring revenue from their expertise, the way software companies do from their products,” said Riyaan Bakhda, a founding engineer at August.
Potential use cases
Imagine a real estate group that reviews commercial leases for tenants. Most of those leases raise the same dozen issues, and the partners already know which terms they accept and which they push back on.
The group packages that work as a fixed-fee lease review. A tenant signs in to the firm’s site and uploads the draft lease. The firm’s agents compare it against the group’s playbook, flag every clause outside the firm’s usual positions and draft a report with proposed changes.
This group has a lawyer check every report before it goes back to the tenant. Other firms validate a product thoroughly when they build it, then let routine matters run without a lawyer reviewing each one. A lease that turns on an unusual issue, such as zoning, becomes an ordinary matter for the group. The tenant pays one price and receives advice the firm stands behind.
The group built the service once and earns from every lease that comes through it. The same approach suits construction contracts, insurance defense and regulatory compliance, where a firm can turn a rulebook and its own guidance into a service that tells a client which obligations apply to it.
What this means for firms
Most law firm revenue is still billed by the hour, so when AI makes the work faster, the firm bills less for it. A product sold at a fixed price works the other way. The firm keeps the gain when its agents handle the routine work well, and each new client who buys the service adds revenue without a matching amount of lawyer time.
Clients benefit too, because they know what the work will cost before it starts. Smaller matters that were uneconomic for a firm to staff can become a service it offers at a price those clients will pay.
Products get better with use
Each product runs on its own agent, which improves with every matter it handles, becoming more accurate and more closely aligned with the firm’s playbook and preferences.
The agent learns from both the firm’s clients and its lawyers. Client matters show it the range of situations the service has to handle, and the lawyers who review its work show it how the firm wants each one handled. When a lawyer corrects a draft, August can save the correction as a skill for the next matter.
The agent also refines its own harness, the instructions and tools that shape how it works, and writes memories of what it has learned. Over time it picks up the drafting style of the firm’s lawyers. More of the firm’s judgment ends up in its agents, where the firm can keep and build on it, and less depends on a few partners remembering it.
Hicksons
Hicksons, a law firm in Australia, is already delivering fixed-price work through August Products. David Fischl, a partner at the firm, said:
“The agents work from our precedents created by our expert lawyers for each client. We decide where a lawyer signs off. What comes out is recognizably Hicksons work, delivered with fixed price certainty for our clients.”
Contact August to learn more about August Products.
