Legal systems & AI consultancy · United Kingdom
Byte Legal IT helps law firms implement, optimise and automate the finance and practice systems their fee earners rely on — and build AI on top of them that answers to the firm's own data. Twenty years in legal, on both the firm side and the vendor side.
Services
Most firms don't need another generalist IT supplier. They need someone who already understands how a 3E bill, a matter budget and a fee earner's month-end actually behave. That's the whole remit here.
New implementations, upgrades and cloud moves — plus the unglamorous follow-up work of making an existing 3E instance behave: configuration, process design, data quality and performance.
Bill layouts, narratives and client-specific formats that stop billing being a monthly argument. Multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction and client-mandated templates included.
Reporting that partners trust: consistent numbers, defensible logic, and dashboards people actually open. Built on the tools your firm already licenses.
Getting 3E to talk to everything else — expenses, e-billing, CRM, HR, intake — and replacing the spreadsheets and manual re-keying that quietly cost your finance team days each month. Much of it built on Power Apps and Power Automate, so it lives in the Microsoft tenancy your IT team already runs.
A subscription-based digest service: fee earners choose what they want to see — WIP, unreleased time, aged debt, anything you add — and it turns up by email or Teams at the interval they pick. Finance never sends it again.
Short, focused engagements: reviewing a vendor proposal, sanity-checking an implementation plan, scoping a piece of work before you commit budget, or covering a gap while you recruit.
Product · Notification service for Elite 3E
Most firms send the same WIP and unreleased-time reports to the same fee earners every week, by hand, from finance. This turns that into a self-service subscription: fee earners tick a box, choose how often, and a single digest arrives with everything they asked for. Finance never has to send it again.
Subscribe once in a simple Power App. WIP, unreleased time, aged debt — or whatever the firm makes available — arrives as one digest, daily, weekly or monthly, by email, Microsoft Teams or both.
Add your own report types with a stored procedure and they appear in the app for people to subscribe to. Visibility is controlled — who can see whose figures is enforced in the database, not in the front end.
Power Apps to subscribe, Power Automate to run it, SQL doing the sums. It sits inside your Microsoft tenancy alongside 3E, so there is nothing new to host, patch or back up.
A fee earner (or someone on their behalf) picks the reports they want and how often.
On schedule, SQL runs each report against 3E with the subscriber's own permissions applied.
Everything due for that person is assembled into one HTML digest — with the AI summary, if enabled.
Sent by email, posted to Teams, or both. Every send is logged so finance can see what went where.
We chose Power Platform because law firm IT teams already run it, already govern it, and usually already pay for it. It's also where a lot of our consulting work happens: if your firm has a process around 3E that still runs on email and spreadsheets — approvals, requests, hand-offs between fee earners and finance — we can build it in Power Apps and Power Automate, without another vendor's server in the mix.
Where a fee earner would otherwise scan forty rows to work out what matters, the digest tells them first: what has moved since last time, what is overdue, and what needs a decision. It reads the same figures the table shows, so the summary and the table always agree.
| Matter | Oldest | WIP |
|---|---|---|
| Harrow Estates — lease renewal | 112 days | £9,400 |
| Marlow Holdings — dispute | 97 days | £6,150 |
| Kestrel Foods — acquisition | 91 days | £4,820 |
AI for law firms
Every firm is being sold AI right now, and most of the pilots quietly stall for the same two reasons: the firm's data isn't in a state a model can use, and nobody owns the answer when it's wrong. That's a systems problem before it's an AI problem — and systems are what we've done for twenty years.
Putting a language model over data you already trust: plain-English questions of 3E and practice data, AI-assisted review of billing narratives before they reach the client, and exceptions in WIP, budgets and matter data surfaced rather than buried.
Bespoke builds for the jobs that eat your team's week: document and contract processing, matter intake triage, retrieval over the firm's own knowledge, and agents wired into the systems people already have open.
The unglamorous half. Where AI genuinely pays back in a firm your size, whether your data is anywhere near ready, what client confidentiality and outside-counsel guidelines actually permit, and how to judge the vendors queueing up outside.
The AI side of the practice is new, and we would rather say so than imply a client list we don't yet have. What sits behind it is twenty years of getting legal finance data out of these systems accurately — which is the part most AI projects in law firms come unstuck on. If you're looking for a partner to build and test this with, at a sensible scale, that's exactly the stage we're at. If you need a supplier with fifty AI deployments behind them, we'll say so on the call.
How we work
No account managers, no bench of juniors learning on your matter. You get senior consultants, a scope you agreed, and documentation your team can still use after we've gone.
A short conversation about what's actually broken — and what it's costing you. If it isn't something we can help with, we'll say so.
Written requirements, a plan and a fixed view of effort, so there are no surprises in either direction.
Delivery against test plans, with UAT supported and issues logged and tracked openly.
Process documentation and knowledge transfer to your team. The goal is that you don't need to call us again for the same thing.
About
Byte Legal IT was founded by Justin Barker, a finance professional by background who has spent the last two decades on legal software — implementing it, developing on it, and fixing it when it didn't do what the firm was promised.
That experience covers time as a systems accountant inside an international law firm, systems analyst and BI roles at global and UK top-100 firms, a spell consulting for the software vendor itself, and eight years as a technical lead and senior manager at specialist legal technology consultancies — most recently leading delivery work for law firm clients.
We're an independent practice, and deliberately a specialist one. No reseller agreements, no vendor quota — just the specific fix your firm needs, from people who have done it before. The newer half of the work is AI: not as a separate offering bolted on, but as the next thing you can do once a firm's data is finally in decent shape.
Technology
Hands-on experience across the legal finance stack and the Microsoft data and automation tooling that surrounds it.
Questions
3E is the deepest specialism, but the work usually spans everything around it — reporting, integrations, document automation, the Microsoft data stack and now AI built on top of it. If your problem sits next to 3E rather than inside it, it's still worth asking.
Because the hard part usually isn't the model. Most AI work in a law firm fails on data: nobody can reliably get the right figures out of the practice management system, so the answers can't be trusted or defended. That extraction problem is what we've been doing for twenty years. If you want a supplier with a long AI client list, we're not it yet — and we'll tell you that rather than let you find out later.
Yes, and it should shape the design from the start rather than be checked at the end. Outside-counsel guidelines, data residency, and what may or may not leave the firm's tenancy all change which architecture is viable. Where it's needed, work stays inside your own Azure tenancy with no data used for model training.
Yes. The notification service is our own build, not a reseller arrangement, and it's the only product we offer. On everything else — 3E, reporting, integration, AI — we have no vendor to favour and will happily tell you when you don't need us.
A few days is fine. Some of the most useful work is a short review, a single set of billing templates, or a second opinion on a proposal before a firm commits to a much larger spend.
Yes — that's common. We're independent, so there's no conflict with your incumbent vendor, and we're happy to work to your team's standards, change control and release process.
Both. Most delivery work is remote, with on-site time where it genuinely helps — workshops, UAT, go-live support.
Under your firm's NDA and information-security requirements. Where possible we work in your environment against anonymised or non-production data, and client names are never used as references without permission.
An initial conversation is free and there's no obligation — if we're not the right fit, we'll tell you that too.
Get in touch
Tell us what's not working — the system, what's happening, and what you'd like to be different.