Meet the Ayora Manage agent: your matters, on demand

The pressure to turn things around quickly has never been higher. Clients expect faster answers on cost, progress and value, and the teams running the business of law feel that same pressure from the inside. Matter management has stopped being a monthly review exercise and become something people expect to stay on top of day by day.

AI has already made real inroads into the practice of law. Research, drafting and review all look different from a few years ago. The business side has moved more slowly. Legal operations still tend to run on disjointed legacy systems that were never designed to talk to each other, let alone answer a question in plain language. That is the gap the Ayora Manage agent is built to close.

It also meets a shift in expectations. Lawyers and business teams now rely on capable AI tools across the rest of their working lives, and they expect the same simplicity at work. Lawyers in particular have grown comfortable working alongside AI, and that is a real opportunity for the business of law, which has always struggled to get lawyers to engage with complicated financial software. An assistant you can simply talk to changes that.

So the promise is a simple one. Instead of hunting through dashboards, spreadsheets and billing reports to work out which matters are drifting, you ask. The Ayora Manage agent sits inside Ayora Manage and lets you work with live matter data in plain language, so you can move from a question, to an understanding, to an action in a single conversation.

What the agent actually does

At its simplest, the agent helps you find matters and understand them. You can ask it to search live matters by practice area, department, matter status or fee earner, and to filter by WIP levels, budget thresholds or specific matter characteristics. Where your access allows, it can pull matters together across teams or the whole firm, so you are not stitching the picture together by hand.

From there it helps you make sense of what you are looking at. Ask it to review work in progress and it can show you who is recording time and against which matters, then point to unusual WIP build-up or time recording that has quietly stalled. Ask it about money and it can check budget against actual hours and fees, flag matters that are over budget or at risk, and surface billing realisation and profitability.

From analysis to action

Analysis is only useful if you can do something with it, and this is where the agent earns its place. Once you have found the matters that need attention, you can ask it to act.

That might mean applying a write-off, modelling a discount or making a billing adjustment. It might mean recording a delay or a change in scope with a short note, updating who is responsible for a matter, or adjusting how work is allocated across the team. When a colleague needs to know something, the agent can post a message against the matter or log an intervention note so the record stays clear.

It can also take on the everyday preparation that usually eats into a morning: pulling together a tailored WIP list, drafting an update to a client about the budget or billing position, setting a WIP alarm so a matter flags itself once it passes a threshold, or producing a matter summary before a review.

Built around the questions you already ask

The point of the agent is that you do not have to learn a new interface to use it. You describe what you need in the way you would explain it to a colleague.

A few examples:

• "Show me matters with high WIP that have not been billed this month."
• "Which of my matters are over budget, and by how much?"
• "Draft a client update on the budget position for this matter."
• "Model a ten per cent discount across these matters and show the effect on profitability."

Clear prompts, with the client, fee earner, threshold or action you have in mind, help the agent reach a useful answer without a string of follow-up questions.

It works with the dashboard, not instead of it

The agent is not a replacement for the Ayora Manage dashboard. The two are designed to work together. Use the dashboard when you want to scan and compare a portfolio visually, sort columns and spot patterns. Turn to the agent when you already know the question you want answered, or the action you want taken, and you would rather ask for it than click through to it.

Most people settle into a natural rhythm: scan in the dashboard, ask the agent to dig into the matters that stand out, then act on what it finds.

Judgement stays with you

None of this removes the lawyer or the finance manager from the decision. The agent is there to assemble, analyse and draft, not to take the call for you. Before anything reaches a client or changes a matter, you review it: check the figures, confirm the matters in scope, and make sure the wording is right. The agent does the legwork so your attention can go to the judgement.

That balance matters in legal finance, where a discount, a write-off or a client message carries real commercial weight.

The bigger picture

Matter management has always been part detective work, part admin and part timing. The Ayora Manage agent takes on the detective work and much of the admin, and gives you back the timing. Instead of discovering a problem at month end, you can ask about it today and deal with it while it is still small.

The practice of law has had its AI moment. With the Ayora Manage agent, the business of law finally gets the same simplicity, and the chance to run legal matters at the speed everyone now expects.

If you would like to see the Ayora Manage agent working on live matters, drop us a line. We would be glad to show you.

‍