Case Studies
Five workflows. Five numbers that moved.
Client names are withheld by agreement — several are federal-adjacent. The workflows, the audit findings, and the results are reported as they happened.
Government contracting · Tysons, VA · ~40 employees
Proposal response assembly
- The workflow
- Responding to federal solicitations — capture, content assembly, compliance matrix, technical narrative.
- Audit finding
- 60–70% of total proposal effort went into finding and reformatting content that already existed somewhere in the firm. The actual writing was the small part.
- Redesign
- An agent-driven retrieval and assembly layer over past performance, resumes, and prior technical volumes. The agent produces the first-pass compliance matrix and drafts boilerplate sections; capture leads write the differentiators.
- Autonomy
- Level 2 — direct. The agent assembles; a human directs and owns the submission.
Property management · DMV · ~60 employees
Tenant maintenance request triage
- The workflow
- Inbound maintenance requests from email, portal, and phone — triaged, priced, and dispatched to vendors.
- Audit finding
- Leasing agents spent 22 minutes a day on manual routing. Urgency was effectively decided by who opened the message first.
- Redesign
- Agent classifies urgency against defined criteria, drafts the work order, and matches to the correct vendor by trade and coverage area. High-urgency items and anything over a cost threshold route to a human before dispatch.
- Autonomy
- Level 3 — sign off.
Accounting · Falls Church, VA · ~30 employees
Month-end close
- The workflow
- Month-end close across a book of recurring clients — trial balance pull, variance review, client commentary.
- Audit finding
- The controller was producing 80% of the work and reviewing 20%. The firm's most expensive person was doing its most mechanical task.
- Redesign
- The agent becomes the first actor: pulls the trial balance, flags variances against tolerance, and drafts the client commentary. The controller reviews, corrects, and signs.
- Autonomy
- Level 3 — sign off. Nothing reaches a client unreviewed.
Medical practice · Bethesda, MD · ~25 employees
Inbound patient question routing
- The workflow
- Patient questions arriving by phone and portal, routed from front desk to the right clinician or administrator.
- Audit finding
- 22 minutes a day spent routing messages from front desk to clinicians, with a long tail of misroutes that cost more than the routing itself.
- Redesign
- Inbound triage automation with clinical escalation rules defined by the practice. Anything ambiguous escalates rather than guesses.
- Autonomy
- Level 2 — direct. Conservative by design; the cost of a wrong route in a clinical setting is asymmetric.
Law firm · Reston, VA
Client intake
- The workflow
- New client intake, from first contact through conflict check and matter opening.
- Audit finding
- Seven distinct jobs were happening inside what everyone called "intake." Three of them were pure data movement performed by paralegals.
- Redesign
- Jobs 1, 3, and 6 — lead capture, practice-area matching, and intake form completion — replaced with an agent. Conflict checks and the attorney judgment calls stayed entirely human.
- Autonomy
- Level 3 on the replaced jobs. Level 0 on everything touching privilege or conflicts.
The pattern
None of these were tool problems
In every case, the audit found the same thing: work that had never been designed, only accumulated. The automation was the last step, not the first. That is the whole method.
Real automation runs while you sleep — and survives the moment you stop watching.
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Five working tools, not a whitepaper. The same instruments I use in the first two weeks of a paid engagement — scoring sheets, a policy template you can adopt as written, and the vendor questions that end bad deals early.
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