Avantia Law Case Study
Avantia's COO brought me in. They're a legal AI start-up — experienced team, clear vision, and a partially trained model for reading legal documents and flagging the issues. The work paralegals do.
What they wanted sounded simple: evaluate the product, find the gaps, help build a roadmap.
Talking to people across the business, the maths got awkward. At the price they'd have to charge, a human paralegal was the cheaper option.
The same conversations kept pointing at another corner of the business — a team doing know-your-customer checks, the due-diligence every regulated firm has to do. No frontier AI, just a service that worked. New clients kept turning up on their own. Their struggle was keeping up: clients wanted the service around the clock, across every time zone.
Identified that one side of the business was scrabbling to convince customers — while the other had customers turning up on their own.
The refocus that followed helped pay for the AI development.
Spencer's experience across product, engineering, customer, commercial and design was the perfect combination for a scale up like ours. His versatility and blend of questioning, coaching, advising and proactivity quickly won the trust of the CEO and senior team and added value from the start across a range of disciplines. After 6 month's of work we think of Spencer as one of our own.
Hannah Thompson
Chief Operating Officer
So what did I actually do?
Listening
Interviews across the business — users, the team, the people around them. Listening for what wasn't said as much as what was. Both the paralegal maths and the overlooked KYC demand surfaced here.
Working it through together
Workshops with the CEO built around what we were finding, so the conclusions were shared rather than presented. Once the leadership team saw where the demand already was, they ran with it.
Making it stick
Coached the team on lean, incremental ways of working. Helped shape a 24-hour version of the KYC service through a "shift" approach. Left behind a habit worth more than any deliverable: checking a market can sustain the work before making the big investment.
What changed
- Refocus on the corner of the business with demand already there — steady revenue that helped pay for the AI development
- A 24-hour service prototype through the "shift" approach
- Clearer positioning built on strengths they already had
- New client opportunities and cross-selling paths for the AI work
