Scalewerk builds custom AI systems for professional services firms. We take the manual, document-heavy work that consumes your best people and turn it into automation you own. Senior engineers who understand your industry. No off-the-shelf software. No vendor lock-in.
Or start with a fixed-scope assessment — 2 weeks, fixed price, no commitment.
These are the patterns we see across professional services firms exploring AI. Not because they're doing anything wrong — because the delivery model was built for someone else.
You bought the platform. Your team tried it for a week. It didn't understand legal documents, couldn't handle your specific workflow, and required more babysitting than the process it was supposed to replace. The annual license renewal just hit your inbox. Six figures. For a login page.
The consultancy charged $75,000 for a 120-slide 'AI Transformation Roadmap.' Beautifully designed. Thoroughly researched. Their final recommendation: hire someone else to build it. You're still manually processing the same documents you were processing before the engagement started.
The development agency quoted three months and $40,000. You're on month eight, $95,000 in, and the weekly status call always ends the same way: 'We're almost there.' Your team has lost confidence. Your partners have lost patience. The spreadsheets are still open.
Someone suggested 'exploring AI.' That became a task force. The task force became monthly meetings. The meetings produced a vendor evaluation matrix. The matrix is still being refined. Meanwhile, your associates are working their third consecutive weekend on document review that should take hours, not days.
AI capability has been production-ready for two years. The models work. The infrastructure exists. The cost has dropped to fractions of what it was. So why do professional services firms keep failing at AI adoption? Because the people selling AI solutions don't understand professional services work. They've never reviewed discovery documents. They've never assembled a compliance matrix. They've never reconciled forty different charts of accounts. They build for generic workflows and sell to specific industries. It fails every time.
Every firm handles matters, cases, proposals, and engagements differently. A 30-person litigation firm in Tysons doesn't operate like a 30-person litigation firm in Bethesda, let alone a government contractor or accounting practice. Off-the-shelf tools can't account for this. They force you to adapt your process to their product.
Professional services data isn't rows in a database. It's contracts with nested clauses, financial statements with footnotes, proposals with cross-references, and case files with thousands of documents. The tools built for 'enterprise' data can't parse the complexity of professional work product.
You can't ship 'good enough' to a client. A 95% accuracy rate sounds impressive until you realize that 5% error rate means missed clauses in a contract, wrong numbers in a financial report, or non-compliant language in a government proposal. Professional services demands precision that generic tools weren't built to deliver.
Every engagement follows the same disciplined sequence. No surprises. No scope creep. No 'we need another phase to figure out what to build.'
No pitch deck. No demo. Just a conversation about what's actually eating your team's time. We ask questions like 'What's the worst 8 hours of your team's week?' and 'What would you build if you had an engineering team?' We want to understand the real workflow — not the one in your employee handbook.
Deliverable
Honest assessment of whether we can help. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so.
No pitch deck. No demo. Just a conversation about what's actually eating your team's time. We ask questions like 'What's the worst 8 hours of your team's week?' and 'What would you build if you had an engineering team?' We want to understand the real workflow — not the one in your employee handbook.
Deliverable
Honest assessment of whether we can help. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so.
We sit with the people who do the work. We watch them do it. We document every step, every decision point, every workaround, every frustration. We produce a technical specification that describes exactly what we'll build, how it will work, and what it will cost. Fixed scope. Fixed price.
Deliverable
Technical specification with architecture, timeline, and fixed-price quote.
WORKFLOW AUDIT // CLIENT: [Redacted]
Time Per Client
We sit with the people who do the work. We watch them do it. We document every step, every decision point, every workaround, every frustration. We produce a technical specification that describes exactly what we'll build, how it will work, and what it will cost. Fixed scope. Fixed price.
Deliverable
Technical specification with architecture, timeline, and fixed-price quote.
WORKFLOW AUDIT // CLIENT: [Redacted]
Time Per Client
Senior engineers building production-grade systems. Not prototypes. Not demos. Working software that handles your real data, integrates with your existing tools, and meets the precision standards your work demands. You see progress weekly. You can test iteratively. Nothing is a surprise at delivery.
Deliverable
Production system, deployed and operational.
BUILD STATUS // PROJECT SW-2026-047
Test Coverage
94%
Uptime
99.97%
Senior engineers building production-grade systems. Not prototypes. Not demos. Working software that handles your real data, integrates with your existing tools, and meets the precision standards your work demands. You see progress weekly. You can test iteratively. Nothing is a surprise at delivery.
Deliverable
Production system, deployed and operational.
BUILD STATUS // PROJECT SW-2026-047
Test Coverage
94%
Uptime
99.97%
Systems need tuning as your business evolves. Your team needs support as they learn. New opportunities emerge. We stay engaged — not because you're locked in, but because the relationship creates value.
Deliverable
Continuous improvement, priority access, accumulated context.
Systems need tuning as your business evolves. Your team needs support as they learn. New opportunities emerge. We stay engaged — not because you're locked in, but because the relationship creates value.
Deliverable
Continuous improvement, priority access, accumulated context.
Every engagement is custom. These are representative examples of the types of systems we build — designed for real professional services workflows.
THE SCENARIO
A 40-attorney litigation firm spending 8+ hours per matter on initial document review during discovery. Associates burning weekends. Partners reviewing work that should have been pre-filtered. Client bills inflating from manual processing.
WHAT WE BUILD
An AI-powered document classification and review system that ingests case documents, classifies them by relevance and privilege, extracts key entities and dates, surfaces priority items, and generates structured review summaries. Integrated with the firm's existing document management system.
8→1 hrs
Target Review Time
97%+
Target Accuracy
120+ hrs/mo
Projected Savings
$840K+/yr
Projected Value
Meridian_Contract_2024.pdf
BoardMinutes_Q3.pdf
AttorneyNotes_Priv.docx
VendorInvoices_Batch.pdf
SettlementDraft_v3.pdf
EmployeeComms_2024.msg
Document Preview
Meridian_Contract_2024.pdf
This Agreement (the "Agreement") is entered into as of March 14, 2024 by and between Meridian Corp ("Company") and David Chen ("Consultant"). Pursuant to Section 4.2(b), the total compensation shall not exceed $2.4M for services rendered during the term...
Extracted Entities
THE SCENARIO
A 60-person government contractor rebuilding every proposal from scratch. Institutional knowledge trapped in the heads of people who might leave tomorrow. Past performance narratives rewritten for every submission. RFP compliance matrices assembled manually.
WHAT WE BUILD
A proposal generation system with institutional memory. It indexes past performance, maintains a compliance matrix library, auto-drafts standard sections from historical wins, cross-references RFP requirements against company capabilities, and generates first-draft proposals that capture the firm's voice and track record.
3wk→5d
Target Turnaround
80%+
Target First Draft
4+ yrs
History Indexed
Positive Signal
Win Rate Impact
Compliance Matrix
Past Performance Matches
DISA Cloud Migration
Army ITES-SW2
DHS EAGLE II
Section Status
Executive Summary
CompleteTechnical Approach
ApprovedManagement Plan
CompletePast Performance
ReviewCost Volume
DraftingSmall Business Plan
SME Req.THE SCENARIO
A fractional CFO practice managing 40+ clients, each with different chart of accounts, different reporting formats, different data sources. Monthly reports that take 4 hours each to compile and format. Partners spending evenings on spreadsheet work instead of advisory.
WHAT WE BUILD
An automated reporting pipeline that connects to client accounting systems, normalizes data across different charts of accounts, generates standardized and custom reports, performs automated variance analysis, and produces client-ready PDF deliverables with the partner's formatting preferences.
4hr→15m
Target Report Time
160+/mo
Projected Hours Freed
<0.1%
Target Error Rate
No New Hires
Scale Impact
Apex Legal Partners
Meridian Holdings
Capital Bridge Advisory
Greenfield Consulting
Stratton & Associates
Pinnacle Ventures
Variance Alert
Capital Bridge Advisory
vs. prior month
Knowing what we're not is as important as knowing what we are. We've drawn these lines deliberately.
Sell you software you don't need
Build exactly what your workflow requires — nothing more
Send junior developers to do senior work
Put the person who scopes the project on the keyboard
Optimize for billable hours
Optimize for your measured outcome
Promise “transformation” without defining it
Give you a fixed scope, fixed price, and fixed timeline before you commit
Lock you into proprietary platforms
Transfer 100% of code, data, and IP to you
Pretend we're experts in everything
Go deep in professional services — law firms, gov contractors, accounting, consulting
Take on work we can't deliver
Say no when we're not the right fit, and refer you to someone who is
Scale by hiring junior talent
Stay small, stay senior, stay focused
Scalewerk is a small engineering firm that does the work ourselves. The person on your call is the person writing your code. No account managers, no project coordinators, no offshore handoffs. We kept the team small on purpose: because professional services firms deserve the same senior-level attention they give their own clients.
Founding Team
Enterprise sales background with technical depth. Building the AI consultancy we wish existed for professional services firms. Every engagement starts with the senior engineer who'll do the work — not a sales team, not an account manager. The person who understands your problem is the person who solves it.
We got tired of watching smart firms get sold AI that doesn't work. So we started building AI that does.
30-attorney litigation practice, D.C.
Ownership: Nothing (cancel = lose everything)
Workflow Fit: 60-70%
Ownership: Everything (code, data, IP)
Workflow Fit: 100%
Figures are representative. Actual costs depend on scope and complexity.
AI Opportunity Assessment
2-week diagnostic of your operations. Prioritized roadmap of AI opportunities specific to your firm. Fixed scope, standalone value, no commitment to continue.
Learn MoreProof of Concept Build
Working prototype of a single workflow in 2-3 weeks. Real data, real results. Show your partners something that works, not another slide deck.
Learn MoreMonthly Engineering Partnership
From Foundation to embedded technical co-founder. Engineering capability that grows with you. Cancel anytime after 3 months.
See Partnership TiersTarget: document review time
Projected reduction in initial review time for litigation workflow automation
Target: cost reduction
Projected operational cost reduction for automated workflows vs. manual processing
Concept to production
Typical timeline from first conversation to deployed, operational system
Client code ownership
Every client receives full source code, documentation, and deployment infrastructure
These are not marketing claims. They are operating principles that shape every decision we make.
We're selective about engagements because the work demands it. Here's how to know if we're the right fit.
No pitch deck. No demo. No 47-slide methodology presentation. Just a 30-minute call about what's consuming your team's time and whether building something custom makes sense for your firm.
If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you. If we can help, you'll know exactly what that looks like — scope, timeline, cost — before you commit to anything.
We respond to every inquiry within 24 hours. Usually faster. You'll hear from an engineer, not a sales team.