Rashid Ali has been a solicitor for 14 years, specialising in commercial property at a mid-sized Brighton firm. By 2024 he was doing more document discovery and contract review than legal thinking. AI looked like the obvious answer — he just couldn't get past the demo videos.
The problem before
A typical commercial property transaction at Rashid's firm generates 800–2,000 pages of disclosed documents. He was personally reading or skimming all of them on every deal. The good ones had nothing wrong; the difficult ones might have one buried problem in a 1,500-page bundle.
Rashid had tried ChatGPT, didn't trust it, stopped using it. He'd read about Claude Projects and had vaguely heard of automation tools, but no time to investigate. His firm's IT lead wasn't going to deploy something on his behalf — too much risk for them, not enough understanding.
Eight weeks
Rashid joined the autumn 2025 AI for Business Bootcamp. The first three weeks he was sceptical. By week four he'd built his first Custom GPT, trained on his firm's clause library and standard exception list. By week six he'd connected it to Zapier so it would auto-process documents emailed to a specific address.
Final-week project: a working pipeline that takes a disclosure bundle, extracts every section that mentions covenants, leases, or rights of way, and produces a structured summary highlighting anything non-standard. Rashid presented it to the cohort's panel day. Two other panellists asked for demos for their own firms.
Now
Rashid uses the pipeline on every transaction. It saves him an estimated 12–15 hours per deal. He's been promoted internally to lead his firm's AI adoption (a job that didn't exist before). His firm is paying for two more solicitors to do the AI for Business Bootcamp in 2026.
He's also kept the documentation tidy — the workflows are version-controlled, the GPT system prompts are versioned, the Zapier flows have monitoring. Bootcamp habits stuck.
I'm not technical and I never wanted to be. The bootcamp got me to a place where I can build the things my firm needed without becoming a different person.