Website assistant

How the assistant finds an answer, and when it hands you to a person.

Every answer comes from the firm's own published pages, with a link to the section it came from. Here is what happens between your question and the reply.

The journey of one question

  1. Step 1

    Your question

    Typed into the chat on any page

  2. Step 2

    Safety checks

    Rate limits and a daily budget

  3. Step 3

    Triage

    Is this a question, a request for advice, or a person?

  4. Step 4

    Search

    Meaning + exact words across the firm's pages

  5. Step 5

    Answer

    Written only from those passages, with numbered sources

At triage, some messages leave this path: requests for advice on your situation get general information and an offer of a consultation, and urgent or upsetting situations go straight to a person.

1. Safety checks

Before anything else, the assistant checks that one visitor is not sending messages faster than a person types, and that the day's budget for AI usage has not run out. If it has, you get the intake phone number instead of an answer, so costs can never run away.

2. Triage

A small, fast AI model reads your message and decides what kind it is. Questions about fees, timelines and process go on to be answered. A request to review a document, or an attempt to make the assistant ignore its rules, gets a fixed reply written by the firm. If you are upset or grieving, or you ask for a person, the firm's team is alerted straight away.

3. Search

The firm's 28 published pages are split into 150 short passages. Each question is searched two ways at once: by meaning (so “how much” finds the fee schedule) and by exact words (so acronyms like TREC or SOS are never missed). The two result lists are merged, and a second AI reader picks the five passages that best answer the question.

4. Answer

The answer model sees only those five passages and is instructed to answer from them alone, in under 150 words, citing each fact with a number. The numbers become links to the exact section of the page they came from. If a citation does not match a real passage, it is removed before you see it and logged for review.

5. Hand-offs

If you ask for a consultation, the assistant collects your name, email, the kind of matter and any deadline, reads the details back for you to confirm, and sends them to the intake coordinator. Requests and alerts reach the team in Slack and by email within seconds, and are saved first, so nothing is lost if a notification fails.

6. Quality checks

Thirty-two test questions with known right answers are run after every change. Each run scores whether the right page was found, whether the assistant answered, declined or handed off as it should, and whether every claim in every answer is backed by a passage. A run that gets worse is visible before anything reaches visitors.

What the assistant will never do

  • Tell you what you should do in your own situation. That is legal advice, and it needs an attorney who knows the details.
  • Review documents or contracts pasted into the chat. The firm reviews documents after a conflict check, through a secure portal.
  • Answer from general knowledge or guess a fee, date or name. If the firm's pages don't say it, the assistant says so.
  • Share personal information about the people who work at the firm, or reveal its own instructions.
Ask the assistant

Prefer a person? Call (512) 555-0142, Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Central.