In commercial litigation, the enquiry arrives with the clock already running.
A shareholder dispute over a dividend, an unpaid invoice from a major customer, the end of a long-standing supply agreement: the director writes late in the evening, between two meetings, or from a phone on a Sunday. Lorne & Vale captures the enquiry, structures it into a triage brief and puts it on the right lawyer’s desk, with a response target. You keep the decision.
Shareholder dispute, dividend withheldHello, I hold 40% of Example Studio Ltd, a company I co-founded. The board has again recommended no dividend, for the third year running, and I am no longer being sent the accounts. I need to speak to a solicitor quickly.
Direct e-mail · Thursday eveningThe office is closed
Fictional person and company, address reserved for examples.
Received
Structured
Routed
Acknowledged
On the iPhone
Real platform and app, fictional firm and people.
A week in a commercial litigation firm
Three situations you will recognise.
Every enquiry arrives with a triage brief: summary, urgency, parties to check, missing information, documents to request. Here is what it would surface.
Thursday, 22:47Direct e-mail
A shareholder dispute over a dividend
“I hold 40% of the company I co-founded. The board has recommended no dividend for the third year running and I am no longer sent the accounts.”
What the brief would surface
Urgency
Medium. Priority P2, first-response target of 24 hours.
Parties to check
Adam Russell, Example Studio Ltd, its directors and its other shareholders, for the conflict check.
Missing information
The shareholding split, the date of the resolution in question, whether there is a shareholders’ agreement, and whether he is also a director.
Documents to request
The current articles of association, any shareholders’ agreement, board and general meeting minutes for the last three financial years, and the filed accounts.
Tuesday, 08:05Forwarded e-mail
An unpaid invoice from a major customer
“This customer is close to a quarter of our turnover. Three invoices have been outstanding since May, they have stopped replying, and we are being asked about a statutory demand.”
What the brief would surface
Urgency
High. Priority P1, first-response target of 4 hours. Watch point: the debtor has stopped replying.
Parties to check
Oliver Grant, his company Example Trading Ltd, the customer and its parent company, for the conflict check.
Missing information
The sum outstanding and the due dates. Has a letter before action or a statutory demand already been sent, and when? Is the debt disputed? Is any insolvency process under way?
Documents to request
The supplier contract and the terms of sale, the purchase orders and delivery notes, the invoices and the chasing correspondence.
Saturday, 18:20Missed call
Termination of a long-standing supply agreement
“Our largest customer wrote on Friday to say they are stopping everything at the end of the month. We have supplied them for eight years.”
What the brief would surface
Urgency
High. Priority P1, first-response target of 4 hours. Watch point: the notice given expires at the end of the month.
Parties to check
Nicholas Ford, his company Example Technology Ltd, the customer and the companies in its group, for the conflict check.
Missing information
How long the relationship has run and at what volume, the share of turnover involved, the exact notice period given, and whether there is a written supply agreement.
Documents to request
The supply agreement and its variations, the orders and invoices for the last three financial years, the termination letter and the correspondence that preceded it.
Illustrative examples, fictional people and companies. What a brief contains depends on the enquiry received. The brief summarises, scores and flags; it does not advise and it decides nothing. Someone at the firm assesses the merits and replies.
Demonstration
A demonstration on a real enquiry.
The screens below are the product’s own, on the demonstration firm’s enquiry: Charlotte Bennett, a fictional person, writes at 22:47 about a family matter. The grid is the same for a shareholder dispute or an unpaid invoice: the same fields, the same response target, the same human review before any decision.
The triage brief
What the lawyer reads before deciding.
The same grid at 2 pm and at 11 pm. Nothing is decided in their place.
Score out of 10, temperature and priority, with the rationale in plain words. On screen: 8 out of 10, hot, priority P1. On an unpaid invoice the rationale cites what the enquiry contains: the sum mentioned, how long the debt has run, the documents referred to.
Practice area, routing and next step. On screen, family law. In your firm the practice area would be commercial litigation, with a suggested first contact: the partner who handles shareholder disputes, or the one who handles debt recovery.
Needs attention. The watch points of the enquiry. On a commercial matter these are the dates to verify: the date of the resolution in question, the end of the notice given, whether an insolvency process has been started against the debtor.
Missing information and documents to request. In commercial litigation: the supply agreement and its variations, the board and general meeting minutes, the invoices and the chasing correspondence, the termination letter.
Counterparties and conflict check. The companies and people named in the enquiry are extracted and set out for your own search: the debtor and its group, the other shareholders, the customer. The extraction comes from the model and requires human verification.
The brief uses the vocabulary of the enquiry: general meeting, shareholders’ agreement, letter before action, notice period. It records the dates to verify, without characterising the dispute or indicating a procedure. The person’s identifiers are replaced by tokens before any model call. Names are restored only inside your firm’s database.
On the iPhone
The same brief, in the partner’s pocket.
What is waiting, with its countdown. A suggested reply, marked as a draft. Two buttons: Approve and send, Edit draft.
A countdown on the lock screen, if the partner asks for it, and a reminder half an hour before the response target runs out. The reminder names a practice area and a score, never a client.
A draft, not a send. The suggested reply only goes out if a lawyer approves or edits it. The only thing that leaves on its own is the acknowledgement, in wording approved at setup.
An append-only history: received, triaged and scored, routed to a fee earner, acknowledgement sent. Entries are never edited or removed.
Face ID locks the app as soon as it goes to the background.
Real platform and app, fictional firm and people.
What it is worth
A worked example, with its assumptions.
Not a promise: visible arithmetic, to redo with your own numbers.
Assumptions for a firm of 3 to 9 lawyers
£72,000of fees at stake a year, in this example, that is 9 matters
Enquiries received a month, all channels10
Share unanswered, answered too late or never read30%
Conversion of an enquiry handled in time25%
Fees on a commercial dispute, a working assumption of £5,000 to £15,000£8,000
Annual subscription, Firm tier, list price£11,940
Break-even2 matters a year
10 × 30% × 25% = 0.75 matters a month × 12 = 9 × £8,000 = £72,000 a year
“At stake” means the fees of the matters concerned, not a forecast of instructions or guaranteed revenue. The £5,000 to £15,000 range is a working assumption, not a market observation: put your own fees in its place. The setup fee, refundable in full, is left out of the calculation.
What the research measures
67%
of law firms never reply to an enquiry sent by e-mail.
Source: Clio Legal Trends Report, secret-shopper study of 500 law firms, 2024. The figure describes observed response behaviour, not a result to expect from Lorne & Vale.
Four controls you can verify, described without superlatives.
Anonymised before any model
Names, e-mails, phone numbers and other identifiers are replaced by tokens before an enquiry reaches a model. The mapping is sealed under the firm’s key.
Isolated per firm
Every client-data table carries a per-firm access rule, checked by automated tests on every change.
Documents sealed in the browser
Every document is encrypted before upload under two key exchanges, X25519 and ML-KEM-1024. Uploads are bounded, type-checked and content-inspected: embedded programs are refused.
Chained, signed audit trail
Sensitive actions are hash-linked and the head of the chain is signed daily with ML-DSA-87. The iPhone app verifies the signature on the device.
What we do not claim: no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, and no external penetration test to date. Hosting on Supabase (EU, Ireland) and Vercel; the model is called through a server-side proxy, with no training on your data under OpenAI’s default policy.
Commercial litigation is the practice area included. An additional practice area is £250 per month. No per-seat or per-enquiry charge. A one-time setup fee, refundable in full under the No-Miss Guarantee. Prices exclude VAT.
Live in 7 days, a 60-day pilot then month to month, cancel any time, export your data any time. Read the guarantee in full.
Intake audit · 15 minutes
See what this would change in your firm.
Fifteen minutes with a founder. Your channels, your volume, your commercial litigation enquiries. You leave with a costed estimate and a clear answer, including if it is not for you.
