How we work
From where you are to where you need to be
Every engagement starts by fixing the current position: what exists, what works and what the business needs it to do. The route follows from there.
The problem statement
Judgement lives in people’s heads. AI needs it as structure
The positions a business will take, and the ones it will concede, sit with the people who negotiate. Technology needs that same judgement as rules, ranges and escalation points. Efforts stall between the two.
Asteriscus works in that gap, in what is now called legal engineering: breaking a process down, deciding what the optimal end product looks like, and reassembling it so the judgement travels with it.
The gap is usually deployment, not drafting.
A contractual spine
A shared way of working, kept flexible
Technology behind, not in front
The translation problem
The work AI now does, Asteriscus has done by hand
The real challenge with legal AI is translation: between legal work, the judgement behind it, and the technology. Asteriscus has done by hand what AI now does: the global terms, playbooks and negotiation handbooks a bank’s lawyers worked from. That is how it knows what the optimal end product looks like.
The work is breaking processes down and reassembling them, and judging what belongs in the contractual spine and what should flex around it. AI now makes that process more efficient, standing behind the judgement rather than in front of it.
“Every engagement is the same job at a different scale: designing systems that solve problems.”
Each stage informs the next.
How an engagement runs
One stage at a time
Carina, Vela and Octans run in four stages. Puppis and Pyxis work differently, as set out below.
Discovery
Map what exists, test the assumptions behind it, and produce a worked example on one contract type.
What it shows shapes the build.
Build
The framework itself: terms, playbooks, positions and the ranges within which the business will move.
The framework sets what rollout has to embed.
Process and rollout
Embedding it in how the team works, including the tooling and the AI workflows that sit behind it.
How the team uses it shows where to extend next.
Extend and maintain
Further contract types and jurisdictions, and keeping the framework current as the business changes.
And what changes feeds back into the framework.
Across the five services
Run through the stages above, usually starting with Stage 0.
Starts with a short Stage 0, then runs alongside the business as an ongoing retainer.
A fixed-fee service with its own four steps, from selection to walkthrough. See the service