The Challenge

Like most law firms, Hicksons was dealing with a familiar structural problem. When documents arrived, junior lawyers had to work through them manually to extract key information before more senior lawyers could offer strategic advice. The work was time-consuming, repetitive, and not what most people went to law school to do.

David Fischl, a partner who leads the firm's digital transformation efforts, saw the problem clearly. Clients needed faster, more cost-efficient advice. Lawyers wanted to spend more time on the work they found meaningful. The two goals were in tension, but only because of how the work was structured.

"I could see that they needed it to be done faster and more cost efficiently," said Fischl. "So we needed to find a way that delivered our clients the advice they needed and allowed our lawyers to do the work that they really enjoyed."

The firm had tried other tools but ran into resistance. Solutions that required manual uploads and repetitive questioning didn't stick. Lawyers needed something that fit into how they already worked.

Finding August

Hicksons ran a serious evaluation process before committing to anything. The team attended two international legal tech conferences, tested multiple vendors on identical complex files, and ran assessments side by side with subject matter experts.

What they were looking for was specific: a platform that could identify the critical details in their files, the ones that only Hicksons lawyers would know to look for and return them in a format their team could actually use. Most tools fell short on one dimension or another.

August stood out for three reasons: accuracy on complex legal documents, the ability to embed the firm's own expertise directly into the platform, and seamless integration into existing workflows. August delivers outputs as fully-formatted Word documents, not chat responses, which means lawyers get information in the format they're already using.

The August team worked closely with Hicksons throughout implementation, helping the firm build the end-to-end solution it had envisioned rather than adapting around the edges of a rigid product.

The Solution

Hicksons' goal was straightforward: give lawyers more time for the work that actually requires their expertise. That meant finding a way to handle the document-heavy, extraction-heavy stages of a matter without routing all of it through junior lawyers manually.

With August, Hicksons built a workflow that does exactly that. Records are uploaded and reviewed at scale. The output is a structured, formatted Word document with chronologies and key findings, delivered directly into the workflows lawyers already use. No extra steps, no reformatting, nothing to interpret.

Associates who previously spent hours working through records before they could contribute to a matter now pick up where the document leaves off, ready to focus on analysis and client work that requires judgment.

“August allows me to focus on the meaningful work that inspired me to become a lawyer. It has taken away the tedious, repetitive, and voluminous tasks that junior lawyers traditionally had to endure, freeing me to focus on learning to deliver strategic advice and developing trust and relationships with my clients.”

— Elias Dehsabzi, Associate, Hicksons

One feature that has had a particular effect on the firm as a whole is the ability to share prompts, chat histories, and workflows within August. Senior lawyers can see how colleagues approached a matter, which raises the collective knowledge of the firm and accelerates how quickly junior lawyers develop.

"Through the history of law, it's taken many years for junior lawyers to progress into more strategic advisors," Fischl noted. "And that has not happened because the junior lawyers don't want to learn faster. It's happened because that's the way the work has been structured."

August changes that structure.

The Results

Since deploying August, Hicksons has seen document review time drop by around 90%. But the numbers tell only part of the story. The firm is serving more clients, retaining staff longer, and building stronger client relationships. Lawyers at all levels report that the nature of their day-to-day work has improved.

“The end result of these improvements for our people is that we have happier employees. We have employees who work with us for longer, and we have better relationships with our clients. It has made me a better lawyer.”

— Elias Dehsabzi, Associate, Hicksons

For Fischl, the gains also have a longer-term dimension. Hicksons believes it can use tools like August to compete more directly with top-tier firms by offsetting the resource advantages those firms have traditionally held.

“Implementing August into our firm was like equipping each of our lawyers with an Iron Man suit. It has supercharged our services, allowing us to deliver increased value to our clients.”

— David Fischl, Partner, Hicksons

“August will provide Hicksons with a competitive advantage in attracting the best lawyers in Australia. Life as a junior lawyer at Hicksons with August means you'll grow and learn dramatically faster.”

— David Fischl, Partner, Hicksons

Looking Ahead

Having built deep familiarity with August, Hicksons is now thinking about how to extend that capability to clients directly. The firm expects a growing number of clients will want to access this kind of document intelligence within their own organisations, opening up a new model of collaboration that doesn't rely exclusively on traditional billing structures.

"I think it's really cool to see what tools like August have done in only a very short period of time," said Dehsabzi, "and what that might mean in the next few years as tools like August continue to mature and they continue to collaborate with law firms like Hicksons."

For Hicksons, August has not just changed how certain tasks get done. It has changed how the firm thinks about what legal service delivery can look like.