# Rachel Fontaine, Managing Partner at Fontaine & Krebs LLP — read of Law Firm AI, June 10, 2026

> 14 years in plaintiff-side personal injury, currently running 9 attorneys and 4 paralegals out of Phoenix. I handle operations alongside my caseload because we can't justify a full-time ops person yet.

## How I got here

My paralegal Denise forwarded me a LinkedIn post with a screenshot of the "47 hours/week saved" stat and wrote "thoughts?" in the Slack. I googled the product name, landed directly on the homepage. I gave it about 8 minutes total, which for me is a long visit. I have a 6-year-old who requires me to be at school pickup by 3:15, so I read fast and decide fast.

## What I clicked first

The hero line "Solo lawyers, stop losing prospects to the night shift" caught me because we are not solo, but we absolutely have this problem. Calls at 8pm on a Tuesday go to voicemail and about 40% of those people have hired someone else by 9am. I know this because I track it. The framing of "qualified lead sits in your queue, ready to review and sign" by 7am is the fantasy I've described to three different vendors in the last two years who then showed me a chatbot that collected a name and phone number.

## Where I paused

The conflict check section. "Zero false negatives" stopped me cold. That is a very large claim. Conflict checks are where firms get sued and disciplined. I re-read the FAQ answer which says the AI "flags soft conflicts (family ties, past employment) for human review." That's actually a more careful answer than the bullet point. But those two things are in tension and the product doesn't acknowledge it. The bullet says zero false negatives. The FAQ says you still control the final decision. Which is it? If I miss a conflict because I trusted a bullet point, that's my bar card.

## What I distrusted

The stats read like they were assembled to look like a credibility stack rather than reported findings. "47 hours/week saved" and "$220K ARR increase" and "3.2x intake volume" in that sequence feel like three different metrics from three different firms being presented as if they're one firm's typical outcome. There's no methodology note. No "based on X customers over Y months." The honest disclosure at the bottom of the page ("we don't have live customers on this idea yet") partially explains why, but then the stats shouldn't be in the hero section presented as averages. That's the kind of thing that makes me stop trusting everything else on the page.

The "cost per-page drops 60%+" in the discovery section is the same pattern. 60%+ of what baseline? My current per-page cost is basically paralegal salary divided by monthly page volume. Is that their comparison? I genuinely don't know.

## What would convince me

One real case study from a PI firm in the 8-15 attorney range that shows their actual intake volume before and after, the specific workflow they replaced, and what the conflict check looks like in practice with a screenshot. Not a testimonial quote. An actual before/after workflow map. I'd also want to know if anyone has had a conflict slip through the AI screen and what happened. The failure mode is more interesting to me than the success metric.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The homepage says "zero false negatives" on conflict checks but the FAQ says the partner still reviews flagged soft conflicts. Walk me through what happens if the AI doesn't flag something at all. What's your escalation path when the system misses a conflict entirely?

2. For the discovery module, are you working with actual Bates-stamped production sets or just uploaded PDFs? My opposing counsel sends some documents as image-only scans. Does your privilege log hold up to a meet-and-confer?

3. You list Intake+ at $299/mo but the honest-hire page says the build investment is around $38K. Are those two different things? Is the $299 a SaaS product I can trial today or am I buying a custom build?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The problem framing is accurate and the honest disclosure at the bottom is genuinely unusual and points in a good direction. But the gap between the hero stats and "we don't have live customers yet" is too wide for me to forward this to my managing partner without more explanation, and the conflict check language needs to be reconciled before I'd let this anywhere near our intake process.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-10. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*
