A firm built a different way
David Chung started Creo Legal in 2017 after more than a decade in the profession, because he was not happy with the way firms were traditionally run. Most still focus on volume, he says, using lower-skilled workers to perform the highest-value jobs, and the whole model breeds an unhealthy obsession with recording time and charging by the hour. Nobody warns you in law school that day-to-day life as a lawyer means spending at least an hour a day meticulously writing down what you have just done — and it was a part of the job he genuinely did not enjoy.
So when he set up his own practice, he made a commitment to himself: drop time recording and charge fixed fees. It made his life better, and he believes it makes his clients' lives better too. Creo Legal is a boutique commercial and corporate firm — a team of five senior lawyers, no juniors, no support staff — increasingly specialised in the technology and health industries. The catch with fixed fees is that they force you to be efficient, so from the earliest days, well before AI, David was chasing one question: how can I do this work as well and as quickly as possible?
When I set up my practice, I made a commitment to myself to essentially drop time recording, just charge fixed fees. It makes my life better and I think it really makes my clients lives better as well.
David Chung
The ceiling of a five-person firm
Doing everything manually simply takes a lot of time, and that limitation bites far harder in a boutique. A large firm with fifty lawyers can find a day's worth of capacity just by everyone doing a little more; a team of five cannot. With no juniors to lean on, David and his colleagues kept hitting a hard ceiling — and at the time, they did not even know what it was costing them.
The shape of the cost was hidden from clients but felt sharply inside the firm. When several matters landed at once, the work had to be ranked, and the client who came fifth in that order might have their work pushed back two or three days, purely because the capacity was not there. You cannot run ten four-hour jobs in a day, especially as a single lawyer. Hitting that ceiling meant the team tearing their hair out, not sleeping, and staying back late just to turn work around.
You can't create an entire day's worth of capacity just by everyone doing a little bit more. Like you can't do 10 four hour jobs in a day. It's just not possible, especially for a single lawyer.
David Chung
Where AI came in
David counts himself an early adopter among his legal colleagues, and when AI arrived he quickly saw it hit every point he had already grown to value. Here was a technology that could let him complete work more quickly while also improving its accuracy and quality at the same time — and previously you always had to sacrifice one for the other. That broke the old trade-off, and let him rethink not just how he works as a lawyer, but how the whole firm works together.
Creo Legal became one of the first firms to use Quillio, and David is candid that even as an early adopter he underestimated how powerful it would be. The tool kept improving almost week to week, and his team kept getting better at using it — so rather than a magic button, it became a capability he could supervise and build the practice around. The result, he says, is a firm that no longer has to run flat out just to keep up.
It's something that could both allow me to complete my work more quickly but also improve the accuracy and the overall quality of the work at the same time. And previously you had to sacrifice one for the other.
David Chung
How Creo Legal works now
The biggest change is one David never expected — it reshaped the work before a client even engages him. Where he once skimmed a contract or a thread of emails and prepared a few questions for an initial meeting, he now reviews the material in the ten or fifteen minutes beforehand and walks in already knowing exactly what the document says, where the problems are, and with a draft action plan in hand. He comes fully prepared, as if he has already done the work — which lets him deliver real value in that first meeting and convert far more of those leads into clients.
That same efficiency lets the firm fix-fee work most others will not touch. His associate director, Sandy, now fixed-fees components of dispute resolution and litigation — initial advice, drafting pleadings — that previously carried too much uncertainty to price. Because thirty or forty per cent more work no longer means thirty or forty per cent more time, the firm can absorb the variability. Their clients are business owners who need cost certainty, and in a dispute that might otherwise be quoted at anywhere between $10,000 and $200,000, giving them certainty in an extremely uncertain context is genuinely valuable.
Now I can come fully prepared as if I've already done the work... it's as if I'd spent three hours looking over their material and thinking about their problem when I might have only spent 15 minutes.
David Chung
Billings up, one fewer lawyer
The growth shows up in the numbers. Last financial year Creo Legal's billings increased by 35% over the year before — with one less team member — and David attributes a significant part of that to the firm's use of AI. Two years ago he was always passively hiring, bracing to turn leads away near capacity; now he is no longer looking for anyone, because the existing team is doing enough work while comfortably coasting at 60 or 70 per cent of what used to be full capacity.
Because most of Creo's work comes from referral, the effect compounds. Completing twenty jobs well in a week instead of ten means twice as many clients who go on to refer others, and the growth stacks exponentially. The freedom that buys has also accelerated the firm's long-held push to specialise: instead of taking a property job out of pressure to hit billables, the team can refer it on and double down on the technology and health work it does best — and David, fifteen years in, says he is more excited about his work than he has been in years.
Last financial year, our firm's billings increased by 35% over the year before. And we had one less team member. And I think a large part of that is because of our use of AI.
David Chung
Where he thinks the industry is heading
David believes AI will be as transformative for legal practice as the internet was for business, and that it has fast-tracked a shift that was already under way — toward a few very large firms, a great many small and solo practices, and mid-sized firms forced to either grow much bigger or break apart. A solo practitioner can now do the high-quality work of a five- or ten-lawyer firm, and a firm like his can compete with the mid-sized and even the top-tier players.
His advice to peers is simple: just give it a go. There is a learning curve, but it is far smaller than most people fear — he trained a new team member on the system quickly. The urgency, though, is real. He points to the snowball effect: a firm that adopts this technology two years later than its competitor starts its trajectory two years behind, and in his firm view, it is simply not going to catch up.
If as a firm you adopt this AI technology two years later than your competitor and your trajectory starts two years later, you're just not going to catch up. That's what I firmly believe.
David Chung