The Shift Log
What actually gets automated in professional firms, what it costs, and where it goes wrong. Written for principals who have to sign off on it. Published Mondays and Thursdays.
A week-by-week plan: audit where the hours go, pick one workflow, build it properly, and measure whether it worked. Written for small professional practices.
9 MIN READ →
A method for measuring the hours your firm loses to non-billable admin, choosing an honest hourly rate, and testing whether fixing it is worth the money.
7 MIN READ →
A working checklist for professional firms: de-identification, the vendor questions on residency and retention, subprocessors, and engagement terms.
6 MIN READ →
A practical intake workflow for a small law firm: structured form, conflict check prompt, matter record and a drafted acknowledgement that waits for approval.
7 MIN READ →
How to automate accounting client onboarding end to end: engagement letter, ID verification, software access, document requests and first-meeting prep.
8 MIN READ →
How to trigger review requests when a job or matter closes, and route unhappy replies to a person before anything unpleasant lands on a public page.
6 MIN READ →
How to build a Friday owner's report that pulls itself together from timesheets, CRM, inbox and accounting, and why a person still reads it first.
7 MIN READ →
A decision framework for small firms: when automation is genuinely right, when off-the-shelf software wins, when to hire, and when to do nothing yet.
6 MIN READ →
Enquiry intake, quote to invoice, review requests, owner reporting and inbox triage: where each leaks hours in a firm, and what good looks like.
7 MIN READ →
Most automations fail on people, not technology. How to design defaults, run training that works, close the old path, and measure whether the new way stuck.
6 MIN READ →
How to set up AI triage on a shared or reception inbox: sensible categories, deterministic routing rules, drafted replies, and what to never auto-send.
7 MIN READ →
Whether AI is safe in a law firm depends on what data goes where, whose account it lands in, and who checks the output before a client ever sees it.
6 MIN READ →
Choosing between n8n, Make and Zapier for a professional firm: hosting and data residency, the shape of the billing, complexity ceiling, and who maintains it.
6 MIN READ →
How to tell when the principal has become the constraint in a professional firm, what that costs in capacity and risk, and which habit to change first.
6 MIN READ →
How to pull project and matter status from the systems your team already uses, instead of asking people for updates that arrive late and slightly wrong.
7 MIN READ →
How agencies and consultancies close the cashflow loop: an accepted quote becomes an invoice and a scheduled follow-up, with Xero or MYOB behind it.
6 MIN READ →
The five cost layers behind an AI automation: build, platform fees, model usage, maintenance and internal time, plus how to calculate the payback yourself.
7 MIN READ →
Every automation eventually fails. Fail-safe design decides whether you find out in ten minutes or ten weeks. What monitoring, alerts and support cover.
6 MIN READ →
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or an open-weight model: how a professional firm should decide, based on data handling, account ownership and cost control.
6 MIN READ →
Accounts, API keys, workflow files and code: what your firm needs in its own name, the lock-in patterns to watch for, and what to ask any provider.
6 MIN READ →
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