What we do · Discover

Discovery sprint

A six-week sprint inside one practice area. We go in and uncover where the team and its clients feel the pain, then work out what would fix it: mostly AI, sometimes commercial or strategic. It ends in a short list of the opportunities worth prioritising, pressure-tested with the people who do the work.

6 weeks1 practice area1 validated shortlist
Weeks 1-2 · Fundamentals, then the map

Every idea in the practice, from all levels

A week grounding the group in what AI can do now, then a workshop mapping how work actually moves through the practice: where time leaks, where clients wait, where margin quietly goes.

Weeks 3-4 · Interviews

Pressure-tested by the people who know

Interviews with the people closest to the work to go deeper: your partners, associates and PSLs of the practice. We use this to shortlist the ones that are worth solving, and those without an obvious fit are parked for later.

Week 5 · Reality check

The strongest get circled

Does the data exist, would users switch, can it be built inside a quarter, will someone pay? Most ideas stop here, and that is the point.

the ones worth building
Week 6 · Prioritise, plan, present

A shortlist and a 90-day plan

A discovery report, an AI ideas pack and a 90-day plan the practice can act on. The sprint in full follows below.

The premise

The problem was never a shortage of ideas

Ask any practice group for AI ideas and you will get a wall of them - some brilliant, most vague, a few quietly impossible. What firms lack is not imagination but a filter: a way to tell which ideas survive contact with real workflows, real data and real budgets.

The sprint runs for one practice area at a time - real estate, disputes, corporate, whichever you choose. Six weeks of structured pressure - training, workshops, interviews and reality checks - turns that group's wall into a shortlist your leadership can fund with confidence, and a 90-day plan for acting on it.

The sprint · Six weeks

From a wall of ideas to a shortlist

One practice area, five phases, each narrowing the field: ground the group, map the friction, test with the people who know, reality-check what survives, and back the strongest with a plan.

Phase 01 · Week 1

Ground the team in what AI can do now

Product thinking starts with an honest map of the technology. A fundamentals session cuts through the vendor noise: what modern AI genuinely does well, where it still fails, and what that means for legal work - so every idea that follows starts from reality.

  • AI product fundamentals, taught by builders
  • What works today and what remains hype
  • The product lens: problems before features
Phase 02 · Week 2

Map the friction in real workflows

A workshop maps how work actually moves through the practice - where time leaks, where clients wait, where margin quietly goes. Jobs-to-be-Done and How-Might-We reframing turn complaints into well-formed product openings.

  • Live workflow mapping with the people who do the work
  • Friction reframed as How-Might-We questions
  • A defined set of opportunity areas out of the room
Phase 03 · Weeks 3-4

Pressure-test with the people who know

Deep-dive interviews with the people closest to the work - the partners, associates and PSLs of the practice - validating assumptions, surfacing the opportunities a workshop cannot, and hearing exactly where adoption would live or die.

  • Structured stakeholder interviews
  • Assumptions checked against daily reality
  • Hidden opportunities surfaced from the floor
Phase 04 · Week 5

Reality-check what survives

Every surviving idea meets the same four questions: does the data exist, would users switch, can it be built inside a quarter, and will someone pay? Ideas that pass advance. Ideas that fail are killed cheaply, on paper.

  • Feasibility, data and adoption checks
  • Market signal tested against our build experience
  • Weak ideas stopped before they cost anything
Phase 05 · Week 6

Prioritise, plan, present

The sprint ends in a leadership session: the shortlist, the reasons behind it, and a 90-day plan for the top pilots with clear go and no-go checkpoints. A path forward with buy-in - not another ideas list.

  • Ranked shortlist with the scoring rationale
  • 90-day quick-start plan with checkpoints
  • Presented for a decision, not a discussion
What you leave with

A shortlist with its homework done

  • Discovery report

    A plain-English account of the bottlenecks, the opportunities and the priorities, with success measures attached.

  • AI ideas pack

    The strongest opportunities, one page each: the problem, how it works, the likely saving, the rollout effort.

  • 90-day plan

    A practical plan for the first pilots, with go and no-go checkpoints designed to build momentum fast.

Why Purple

Scored by the people who build the winners

An ideas exercise is only as good as the judgement applied to it. Ours comes from people who then have to build what gets chosen: every idea in the pack is scored against what construction actually takes, and the strongest ideas from walls like these have become products in our portfolio.

See where sprint ideas end up in our work, or start with the firm-level view in our AI strategy sprint.

The first step

Find the ideas worth building

Six weeks, one practice area: from a wall of suggestions to a funded shortlist with a 90-day plan. If you already know your priority, skip straight to a prototype conversation.