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For law firm COOs

Grow the practice,
not the back office.

Caddi AI Agents take the repeated work off intake, billing, time and collections, the teams that answer to you, and show you every run, so the business side scales with the matters instead of with headcount.

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SOC 2 Type II150+ integrationsEvery run logged

Help me automate prebill review in Elite 3E and Microsoft Outlook. Caddi builds the loop and runs it.

The role

What a law firm COO does

A law firm chief operating officer runs the business side of the firm and reports to the managing partner. Finance, technology, human resources, marketing, facilities and legal operations report in, so the COO answers for the whole path from a new matter to collected cash, and for what that path costs. Smaller firms often call the role executive director or director of administration; the scope is similar, the COO title signals a seat at the management table.

The pressure in 2026 is cost. Thomson Reuters' Law Firm Financial Index for Q2 2026 shows compensation expense up 8.3% and overhead up 7.7% year on year. Rates and demand are growing too, but every matter still runs through the same intake, billing and collections teams, and that is where a COO has room to move margin without asking lawyers to work differently.

Owns
  • The firm's operations budget and the business-side teams
  • The intake-to-cash pipeline: open, record, bill, collect
  • Staffing ratios and the cost of the back office
  • Technology investment, with the CIO
  • Vendor portfolio and contracts
  • Operations reporting to the managing partner and the executive committee
Measured on
  • Realization and collection
  • Lockup: WIP plus receivables, in days
  • Overhead per lawyer, and staff-to-lawyer ratio
  • Time to open a matter, and billing cycle time
  • Profits per equity partner
Lives in
Elite 3EAderantIntappiManageMicrosoft 365OutlookSalesforce
The week

Where the business side's week goes

Every team that reports to a COO has the same shape of problem: skilled people doing the same data work every day, across systems that do not talk to each other. These are the places it costs the most.

The workWhere it happensWhat Caddi does
Opening new mattersIntapp, Elite 3E or Aderant, iManageOpens the approved matter in every system from the intake record. See it
Prebill reviewElite 3E, Aderant, OutlookSends prebills to the billing partner, collects edits, chases the ones that stall, and flags entries that break the client's guidelines. See it
Time captureOutlook, calendars, the financial systemDrafts time entries from the email and calendar activity behind each matter, for the lawyer to review and release. See it
Collections follow-upThe financial system, OutlookSends the reminders on aged receivables on the cadence you set, logs replies, and escalates to the relationship partner. See it
Guideline complianceClient guidelines, e-billing portalsChecks entries against each client's billing rules before the invoice goes out, so fewer come back rejected. See it
Operations reportingSpreadsheets, the financial systemAssembles the weekly operations report from the systems of record and sends it to the people who read it. See it

“It's already at the point where we have it running on a schedule. When they come in in the morning, they go into the work that was processed and just double-check. All of the admin team can take ownership of that.”

Operations manager, law firm
Discover

Know which work to automate first, with evidence.

Discover reads the activity in the tools each team already uses, with the access they already have, and ranks the repeated work across the business side by the hours it takes. It is a ranking you can defend to the executive committee, because every finding shows how often the work happened and how long it took.

  • Counts across shared inboxes and shared systems
  • Rank by hours or by confidence
  • Read only, one run per team
How Discover works
High confidence

Morning Inbox Triage and Matter Filing

Read each new message in Outlook, open any Docusign envelope, match it to the matter in Clio and file the executed copy to NetDocuments.

152hrs / yr5×/week · ~35 min each
Microsoft OutlookDocusignClioNetDocuments

What Caddi saw

  • 1,204messages read in Outlook in the last 30 days
  • 418Docusign envelopes opened from those messages
  • 412matters matched in Clio and filed to NetDocuments
  • 6exceptions raised for review in Teams

Why it’s worth automating

Every message already names the client and the matter. The four steps are the same each time, and the tools never talk to each other, so you carry the details between them by hand.

Per occurrence
35 min
Per week
2.9 hrs
Observed over
30 days
Build next
Automate

The teams build it. IT approves the connections.

The billing coordinator who does the prebill run walks Caddi through it, and Caddi drafts the workflow, asks about the cases it did not see, and runs it. No development queue, no consultant, and the workflow changes when the process does. On average, a first agent is built in about 45 minutes.

  • Built by the person who does the work
  • Runs in the systems you already pay for
  • Caddi builds the workflow with you, then verified code runs it against your systems through their APIs, the same way every time. Any model step inside a run is scoped, logged and reviewable.
How Automate works
Govern

See all of it, in one place.

Govern is the firm-wide view: every agent every team has built, what each one did this week, and every run behind it. When the managing partner asks what the automation program has returned, the answer is a record, not a survey.

  • Every agent across the firm, and who owns it
  • A weekly summary of what each agent did
  • 99% of agent runs complete successfully
How Govern works
FAQ

Questions law firm COOs ask us

What does a law firm COO do?
A law firm chief operating officer runs the business side of the firm and reports to the managing partner. Finance, technology, HR, marketing, facilities and legal operations typically report in. The COO owns the operations budget and the intake-to-cash pipeline, and is measured on realization, collection, lockup, overhead per lawyer and, ultimately, profits per equity partner.
What is the difference between a law firm COO and an executive director?
The scope is often similar, and usage varies by firm. Executive director is the traditional title for the top administrator at a midsize firm. Chief operating officer usually signals an executive seat alongside the managing partner, with finance, technology and HR leaders reporting in. A firm administrator is typically the equivalent role at a small firm, with a narrower remit.
Where should a law firm COO start with AI automation?
Where the hours are, measured rather than guessed. Run Discover on one team's tools, open the top findings, and pick the one with the most hours and the clearest evidence. For most firms that lands in intake, prebills or time capture, because those run on every matter.
How does a COO measure the return on automation?
From the run record. Every run is logged, so the hours a workflow returns are its runs multiplied by the time the work took by hand, which Discover measured before you built it. Across Caddi customers, the average is 150 hours automated for every hour spent teaching Caddi.
Does it need an IT project?
No development project. IT approves which systems Caddi connects to, and Caddi runs with the access each person already has. The teams that do the work build the workflows.
Is our client data used to train models?
No. The contents of your connected systems are never used to train models. Calls to OpenAI and Anthropic run under zero-data-retention terms, and data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Caddi is SOC 2 Type II attested.

The law firm COO: the role, the scorecard and the first 90 days →

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See where your business side's hours go.

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