AI systems studio for small and mid-sized firms

You're behind. Not as behind as you think.But you can't wait another quarter.

Five minutes for an instant AI readiness snapshot for your firm. Or thirty minutes on a call with Marc. Either way, you walk away with three quick wins and a written report you can use.

Free, both paths No deck, no pitch Yours to keep

Your answers stay between you and Marc. Used to write your report. Not stored after delivery, not shared, not used to train anything.

Pick the one that fits how you work.

Path A · Self-serve

Five-minute self-assessment.

5 minutes · browser only · instant score

Eight questions about your firm, your data, and where the time goes. Submit, and your AI Readiness Snapshot loads on the screen with a score, three quick wins, and a recommended starting tier. We email a tailored full report within 24 hours, hand-reviewed by Marc.

Path B · Talk to Marc

Thirty minutes with the founder.

30 minutes · video or phone · same week

Book directly on Marc's calendar. We talk about your firm, the work that takes the most time, and the constraints we have to design around. Marc writes the assessment from your conversation and sends it the next morning. No pitch, no junior associate, no follow-up sequence unless you ask for one.

If you've been putting this off

Your competitors are deploying AI right now.You don't have to copy them. You have to get started.

Reed Smith named a Chief AI Officer. K&L Gates won an Innovation Icon for AI deployment. Harvey raised $200M. AmLaw 100 firms are running seven-figure AI budgets with dedicated teams. Whether you're in law, healthcare, accounting, or insurance, the same pattern is unfolding in your industry.

You don't need a Chief AI Officer. You don't need a six-month strategy engagement. You need to start with one or two use cases that actually fit your firm, deployed in days, with the data staying where it should. That's what we do.

Owner-led firms in regulated industries who can't put client data in a public tool.

Law firms with 10 to 150 attorneys. Privilege rules out off-the-shelf SaaS, partners want a plan, associates are already pasting things into ChatGPT.

Healthcare practices, multi-location specialty groups, and MSOs with HIPAA exposure on charts, prior-auth, and clinical notes.

Accounting and CPA firms drowning in tax-season document work, with client confidentiality that rules out public AI tools.

Insurance agencies and MGAs with claims documents, policy language, and underwriting files that need to stay private.

20 to 250 employees, $5M to $75M revenue. The owner, managing partner, or COO signs the check. No procurement committee.

Ready to start in 14 days, not six months. Working code beats slideware. Retainers from $4,500 a month, with the first month free.

For your IT director, your security review, and your ethics committee.

The stack

Anthropic Claude models, orchestrated with Claude Code and Claude Design. Deployed on your infrastructure, your private cloud, or air-gapped where the data demands it. No external API roundtrip. No vendor lock to a SaaS console.

Audit-ready by design

Every agent action is logged with structured attribution. Decisions are replayable. Multi-agent flows produce a trail your compliance officer can read end-to-end. Designed for the regulator conversation, not around it.

Compliance posture

BAA-friendly architecture from day one. Data residency stays where you specify. Privilege, PHI, and PII never leave your security perimeter. We will sign your standard security questionnaire, your DPA, and your BAA before any data moves.

Capability transfer

We don't just install AI. We install the capability to build more. Your engineering team learns agentic development on the systems we ship. When the engagement ends, you have working software and a team that can extend it.

Specific. Quantified. Yours to keep.

Every recommendation is matched to your firm's data sensitivity, your team, and your timeline. Some firms get private deployment patterns. Some get a managed-tool adoption plan with the right governance. Some get workflow automation with AI under the hood. The report tells you which posture fits, and why.

Every quick win has an estimated time or dollar value. Every recommendation includes a one-paragraph implementation sketch your IT director can read in two minutes. If we are not the right fit, the report says so.

After you read it, you decide if there's a next step. No follow-up sequence. No drip campaign. No pitch unless you ask for one.

Two senior operators. Pittsburgh. Whatever AI posture fits your firm.

Marc Shade has shipped software for corporate clients for twenty-plus years. Scott Frederick Laughlin builds AI and cloud infrastructure. The two people in the room are the two people writing the code. No junior labor leakage. No slideware.

We work across the spectrum: full private deployments where the data demands it, managed-tool adoption with policy and training where it does not, and the workflow automation underneath either one. We are based in Pittsburgh and serve mid-sized firms regionally and nationally. Read the law-firm offering →

If you've read this far

Take five minutes. Or call.

You're either still reading because something here matched what you're working on, or because you wanted to make sure I wasn't wasting your time. Either is fair.

The path with the least friction is the snapshot. Your answers stay with me. The full report lands in your inbox the next morning. If you want to pick a time on my calendar instead, that link is below. If you'd rather just call, the number is too.

— Marc Shade Founder · 2 Acre Studios · Pittsburgh