A new firm, built a different way
Dicky Abraham has only ever practised in one area. He started at a boutique firm in Melbourne, rotated through a few practice groups, and settled in commercial litigation. From there he moved to Goldsmith's Lawyers, where he spent about five years learning to run complex matters on a deliberately lean model — substantial claims, often against top-tier firms with an army of lawyers on the other side, fought on a tight budget.
When he and his wife had their son, they moved back to Perth, and Dicky decided it was finally time to do something he had always wanted to do: practise on his own. He set up Sperling Legal, a specialist commercial disputes firm handling everything from simple debt recovery to shareholder disputes and insolvency. But he did not want to build just another firm. He wanted to build it around AI from the very first day — not as an integration bolted onto an existing practice, but as the foundation the whole workforce was structured on.
The firm is built around AI, so AI is not necessarily an integration. We've built the workforce around AI and we did that for a specific reason.
Dicky Abraham
The cost of the old way
Towards the end of his employed career, Dicky kept watching the same thing happen. Matters with genuine merit could not be run all the way to trial, because the legal fees would be too much for the client to bear — and if they lost, they would be paying for the army of lawyers on the other side as well. Again and again, good cases settled not on their merits but on whether the client could keep running their business.
The manual grind underneath that cost was just as wearing. Drafting chronologies. Taking file notes. Writing detailed time narratives at the end of every day to justify the value of the work. Necessary from a risk perspective, but slow, repetitive, and — for a sole practitioner with no junior lawyers to lean on — a real weight. Lawyers' costs had stopped being a consideration and become the focal point, and that was the thing Dicky set out to change.
We had instances where matters had great merit, but clients were hamstrung by the fact that their lawyers' fees would be far too much if they ran all the way to trial.
Dicky Abraham
Finding a guide he could test
Before he started, Dicky spent about three months researching whether the practice he had in mind was even feasible — whether the technology was there yet, and which tools could support it. He looked hard at the options, including Harvey, but for a boutique or sole practitioner just starting out they were expensive and asked him to commit to a fixed term. In his first year of practice, with everything still untested, what he needed above all was flexibility.
His honest first reaction to Quillio was scepticism — he had not come across anything quite like it. So he did what a litigator does: he tested the claims. He met the team, researched the capabilities himself, and checked the comparison table on the website against his own experience rather than taking it on faith. The price point worked, the flexibility was there, and when he put it to the test the results held up — so he signed up.
First I was skeptical because I hadn't come across something like AI legal assistant... there was a table on your website which demonstrated how well you guys did things compared to other models. I wanted to test that out myself and see whether that was actually the case. And happy to say it was.
Dicky Abraham
How the practice runs now
AI is woven through every workflow at Sperling Legal, from the first client meeting to billing. A new matter starts with a conference; the transcript and the client's documents are fed into Quillio, and Dicky scopes the cost proposal together with it — directing it to plan for mediation, or an interlocutory application for security for costs, as the matter requires. Quillio has learnt his rates and his style, so now the only thing he really settles is the time he allocates to each stage of litigation. That capability underpins the Sperling model of costs: capped fees for each stage, which gives clients genuine budget certainty.
He treats Quillio like a graduate lawyer he can talk to rather than type at. He asks it to draft and review documents, to give him a game plan on how to approach an issue, and to work through hundreds of thousands of discovery documents to check everything has been provided. On his first big matter — a County Court debt dispute in Victoria that turned on tracing funds through a mountain of bank statements — Quillio traced the transactions and he completed the analysis in about 45 minutes, work he expected would otherwise have taken two or three hours. An unexpected bonus: when a matter intersects with an area outside his expertise, such as a family law issue on a liquidator matter, Quillio points him to the right legislation and practice notes instead of a phone call to a colleague.
I treat it essentially as a grad. So I don't necessarily type the prompts. I speak to the legal assistant.
Dicky Abraham
What changed
The transformation Dicky describes is about where his hours go. The time he used to lose to non-billable grind — chronologies, file notes, time narratives — is now spent on the analysis that actually wins matters, and clients get the same value or better. A chronology task that once took a junior and a paralegal more than a week, on a voluminous construction dispute, he reckons could now be broken into segments and done in about a day and a half, saving the client an enormous amount.
His cost proposals, which started out an hour or so off in either direction, are now accurate to within about 20 minutes — accurate enough to underpin capped fees without losing money. The feedback has been strong: clients value the detail in his narratives, which show exactly what work was done and why, and he is building time honestly rather than rounding up. A practice that began with zero clients is, almost a year in, going really well.
If it took me two hours to just undertake the tracing exercise and another hour to do the analysis, that's three hours worth of work that usually would have been done at a traditional law firm. Now, I did it in about an hour.
Dicky Abraham
Advice to other lawyers
Asked whether he could go back to practising without AI, Dicky is unequivocal: absolutely not. AI is the central, most important component of his practice — in most firms it is the employees; in his, it is the systems he has built. The cost savings and efficiencies he can pass to clients are now part of how the firm works, and giving them up would mean struggling immensely.
He is encouraged about the future, and lawyers are starting to ask him how he set the firm up. His view is that adopting AI is harder for established practices, which have to integrate it into existing workflows and scale it safely — but it can be done, and it should be. AI is moving so fast that a firm not on top of it now is already playing catch-up.
I can't go back to practising without an AI because I've gotten so used to working with the AI that it'll be very difficult... AI is the future. It's changing at such a rapid pace that if you're not on top of it now, you're playing catch up.
Dicky Abraham