The situation
The business had 25 people, mostly fee-earners supported by a small ops team. It was a well-run firm. But one task was quietly consuming a disproportionate amount of senior time: proposals.
Every proposal meant pulling pricing from one place, scope notes from another, and background information from somewhere else. Then formatting it consistently. Then getting it reviewed and out of the door. The average time was four to five hours per proposal. With 30 to 40 proposals going out each month, that was the equivalent of a full-time role, being carried by people whose time was better spent on clients.
The ops lead had tried templating the documents. It helped a little, but the information still had to be hunted down every time. Nothing about the problem was difficult. It was just relentless.
What we did
We spent two weeks working closely with the team to understand exactly how they operated. Where the information lived, how decisions were made, what the fee-earners needed to see before they signed off. We did not assume anything.
What we built was simple by design: a tool that pulled the relevant information together automatically and dropped it into the firm's standard proposal template, ready for review. The fee-earners still read it, adjusted it, and made the judgement calls. That part did not change. What changed was the hour they used to spend assembling the raw material before they could start thinking.
We also left a few things deliberately untouched. The pricing decisions stayed with the partners. The tone and emphasis of each proposal stayed a human call. The final sign-off process did not move. The point of the work was to take the grunt work away from the people doing the thinking, not to take the thinking away.
The result
Proposal time dropped from four to five hours to under one. The ops team recovered a full day each week. The fee-earners kept full control over what went out. They reviewed, they adjusted, they decided. What they lost was the grunt work. That was the point.
The business now sends the same volume of proposals with significantly less time invested per one, and the quality is consistent in a way it could not reliably be before. The partners mentioned in passing, a few weeks in, that they had stopped dreading the admin side of winning new business. That felt like the real result.
Frequently asked questions
Did the fee-earners lose any control over what went out to clients?
No, and that was non-negotiable from the start. The fee-earners still read every proposal, adjust it, and make the judgement calls about scope, tone and emphasis. Pricing decisions stayed with the partners. The final sign-off process did not move. What changed was the hour they used to spend assembling the raw material before they could start thinking. The point of the work was to take the grunt work away from the people doing the thinking, not to take the thinking away from them.
Where did the source information for proposals actually live?
Across more places than the firm initially realised. Pricing sat in one system, scope notes in another, background information on the client and the matter in a third, and a lot of useful context lived in past proposals on the shared drive. We spent the first two weeks mapping where each piece of information actually lived and how decisions were made before assuming anything. That mapping is the bit most templating exercises skip, which is why templating alone had only helped the firm a little.
How long was it before the team was sending real proposals through the new tool?
The first two weeks were research and design, working closely with the team to understand exactly how they operated. Build and rollout ran from there, with the ops lead and one fee-earner using it on real proposals before the firm switched the team across. By the end of the first month after kickoff, proposals were going out through the new flow at the firm's normal volume of 30 to 40 per month, with the ops team noticeably less stretched and the partners signing off on quality.
Would this work for a smaller firm sending fewer proposals each month?
The maths gets tighter the fewer proposals you send. At 30 to 40 a month the saved hours add up to roughly a full-time role's worth of capacity, which is a clear win. At 5 to 10 a month, the case is more about consistency and stress than headcount, and the build needs to be scoped accordingly. A 25-person firm sending fewer than 10 proposals a month would probably get more value from a lighter version of the tool, and we would be honest about that in scoping rather than overbuild.