Your client trusted you
with what they could not say
anywhere else.

What the assessment actually delivers.

A written sovereignty-posture document, organized the way a state bar disciplinary counsel or a malpractice carrier underwriter would organize a review. Three to six pages on the short cycle, six to twelve pages on the long cycle. Named observations, sourced to your firm's actual vendor stack and practice areas, with a remediation order written for a small firm's reality (the partner who reads vendor contracts at night, the associate who has the AI tab open, the office manager who actually reconciles the IOLTA) and not a sales-cycle reality.

The deliverable is yours. Keep it, share it with your managing partner, file it with your malpractice carrier's next renewal packet, or work the remediation yourself. There is no obligation to engage Sterling for any work beyond the assessment. If we can help, you will know. If you do the work in-house from the assessment alone, that is also a good outcome.

The threat surface, named.

Four exposures sized specifically for solo practitioners and small law firms. None of these are hypothetical. All of them are showing up in current state bar advisories, malpractice carrier renewal questionnaires, sanctioned-attorney case law, and the legal trade press.

The hybrid cycle, sized to your practice.

The general success.build/risk evaluation runs a two-hour cycle. Most solo and small-firm attorneys fit that shape. Litigation boutiques with active matters, firms with multiple practice areas, firms approaching a known disciplinary review, and firms preparing for a malpractice carrier renewal often want more depth and the longer cycle.

So the attorneys assessment is scope-selectable on the discovery call. Both options are free. We help you size the cycle to the firm's actual surface area.

• Short cycle (about two hours of your time, roughly one week elapsed). Thirty-minute discovery call. Homework on your side: vendor list, a quick description of the AI tools in actual use across the firm (named, not generic), and any state bar AI guidance you are aware of in your jurisdiction. One sixty-minute evaluation session. A three-to-six page written sovereignty- posture document delivered within five business days. Best fit for solo practitioners, two-to-five attorney firms, and any firm with a focused question ("is our use of ChatGPT for drafting defensible," "what is our state's posture on AI in practice," "how does our trust-account software hold up").
• Long cycle (about ten business days, ethics-opinion-shaped deliverable). Forty-five-minute discovery call. One week of homework on our side: we read the relevant state bar ethics opinions and advisories for your jurisdiction, pull the current Terms of Service for every named vendor, check for AI feature activation defaults across the stack, and structure the evaluation around Model Rule 1.6, your state's Rules of Professional Conduct, and any practice-area-specific layer (criminal defense Brady/Giglio production, family law minor data, immigration practice document handling, plaintiff contingent-fee practice trust accounting). One ninety-minute evaluation session with the managing partner or sole practitioner, the office manager or paralegal who handles vendor relationships, and the firm's IT lead if separate. A six-to-twelve page written deliverable within five business days of the evaluation session. Best fit for litigation boutiques, firms five-to-twenty-five attorneys, firms with multiple practice areas, and firms preparing for a known upcoming audit or renewal.

The choice is made on the discovery call, not before. Bring the question, we will help size the cycle. Either option is free. Either option produces a written deliverable that is yours to keep, share, or file.

Who this is for.

The fit is clearest for solo and small-firm attorneys in the $500K to $10M annual revenue band with one to twenty-five attorneys, where the practitioners themselves are the people reading vendor contracts and choosing AI tools. Larger firms typically have an internal general counsel, a compliance function, or a CIO who runs this work in-house; this page is not built for that buyer.

• Solo practitioners across any practice area where the firm's tool choices, vendor contracts, and AI use are decisions the practitioner makes personally.
• Two-to-five attorney general practice firms with mixed civil, family, real estate, and estate work.
• Small litigation boutiques (plaintiff or defense, civil or criminal) with active matters and the corresponding work-product and Brady/Giglio obligations.
• Small immigration practices handling sensitive client documents, family-status data, and matter files often spanning multiple jurisdictions.
• Small family law and matrimonial practices with minor-data exposure, contested custody matters, and elevated confidentiality stakes.
• Small estate planning and trusts-and-estates firms with intergenerational client relationships, multi-party engagement, and document repositories that span decades.
• Growing-small-firm practices in the ten-to-twenty-five-attorney range that have added vendors faster than vendor governance has kept up.

Adjacent practice types we also work with

• Of-counsel and part-time practitioners with a solo posture but smaller scope; the short cycle fits most of the time.
• Bar-association legal aid programs and clinics where pro-bono and reduced-fee practice creates a different funding shape but the same Model Rule 1.6 obligation.
• Legal-services 501c3s and other nonprofit-structured law practices (Legal Aid Society chapters, legal-services corporations, public-interest law firms) where the firm operates as part of a nonprofit cluster. The Model Rule 1.6 framing is held here; the cluster-stewardship questions across the related 501c entities route to the nonprofits and tax-exempt organizations assessment.
• Independent legal-process and document-prep services operating under state-specific limited-practice rules, where vendor exposure is similar but the regulatory frame differs.
• Solo and small-firm patent and trademark practitioners with USPTO confidentiality obligations layered on Model Rule 1.6.
• Canon-law attorneys, religious-tribunal advocates, and attorneys serving faith-based institutions where the practice carries an additional tradition-specific obligation alongside Model Rule 1.6. The privilege-holding framing is held here; the tradition-specific institutional framing routes to the religious institutions and diaspora community organizations assessment.
• In-house single-lawyer departments at small companies or nonprofits where the lawyer is also wearing operations, vendor management, and compliance hats simultaneously.
• Mediators and arbitrators with confidentiality obligations under mediation statutes and arbitral institution rules that interact with vendor AI in ways most haven't reviewed.

Why us.

Sterling Solutions is a Westchester-based small firm. We do not run on venture capital. We do not have a sales team pretending to be your friend. We do not have an exit horizon. We have published values (success.build/ethos) and a written anti-lock-in doctrine, and the architecture of our own platform proves it: every layer is swappable, every export is clean, your data is yours from day one and on the day you leave.

We are not a practice management vendor and we are not pitching one. The assessment is not a stalking horse for a system conversion engagement. If the conclusion is "your AI usage is defensible with these three documentation gaps closed," that is the conclusion. If the conclusion is "your practice management vendor's contract is much worse than you realized and the remediation path is renegotiation at the next renewal," that is the conclusion. We have no commission structure with any of the vendors we evaluate.

The privilege belongs to the client. The lawyer holds it in trust. The vendor stack a firm operates should reflect that hierarchy, not invert it. The same logic applies to our own work: the people we serve are not products, and the data we hold is in trust. We take the analogy seriously because it is not an analogy. It is the same duty shape, named in different professional vocabularies.

The same duty-shape repeats next door. At behavioral health practices and clinics, the therapeutic alliance is the asset and clinical confidentiality is the obligation; HIPAA, 42 CFR Part 2, and every behavioral health profession's ethics code name the same hierarchy Model Rule 1.6 names here. When the firm operates as a legal-services 501c3 or any nonprofit-structured law practice, the cluster-stewardship questions across the related 501c entities route to the nonprofits and tax-exempt organizations assessment. When the practice carries an additional tradition-specific obligation (canon-law attorneys, attorneys serving religious tribunals, faith-based institutional counsel), the tradition-specific institutional framing is held at the religious institutions and diaspora community organizations assessment. Different vocabularies. Same anti-lock-in doctrine for the data the privilege or the alliance or the stewardship duty is built on.

What this page is not.

This is not a pitch for a six-figure modernization engagement disguised as a free assessment. The assessment is the deliverable. If you read it, file it, do the work in-house, and never speak to us again, that is a good outcome and we are not chasing you for a sales call.

This is not legal advice. Sterling Solutions is a technology firm, not a law firm. The written deliverable identifies sovereignty and ethics-posture gaps and names the regulatory and Rules-of-Professional-Conduct categories they sit under. Decisions about specific actions with legal consequence (state bar inquiries, malpractice carrier communications, vendor contract renegotiation, client-disclosure obligations around AI use) should run through your own counsel or a peer attorney with the relevant subject-matter expertise. We are happy to coordinate with them.

This is not an audit shaped for a large-firm general counsel. Those reviews exist and they cost five figures and they are built for firms with internal compliance and risk teams large enough to receive them. This assessment is shaped for the solo or small-firm attorney who is reading their own vendor Terms of Service on a Sunday because no one else will.

Tire-kickers, briefly.

The evaluation is honest work. We do the homework on our end. We read the state bar advisories and ethics opinions that apply to your jurisdiction. We pull the current public Terms of Service for every vendor you name. We come to the evaluation session prepared. We ask the same of you: bring the partner or practitioner who actually owns the firm's vendor relationships and AI tool choices, and bring a real intent to read what we deliver. Curiosity is fine. Performative curiosity is not what this offer is for.