Operational Wins That Didn’t Look Impressive at First

2025-11-18 | Case Studies | by DJC AI Team

Industry: Legal Services The "Boring" Win: Automating Folder Creation.

The Context

Lawyers live in files. Every new case requires a specific folder structure: Case ID / Drafts / Evidence / Correspondence. Inside "Correspondence," they need subfolders for Client, Opposing Counsel, Court.

The Problem

Manually creating these folders took a paralegal 15 minutes per case. With 200 new cases a month, that is 50 hours of highly-paid paralegal time wasted on "Right Click -> New Folder." Worse, humans made typos. "Correspondance" vs "Correspondence." This broke the search scripts.

The Solution

We wrote a 50-line Python script.

Input: Case ID
Action: Create directory tree + Google Drive link.

Cost to build: $200. Time to build: 2 hours. AI used: None.

The ROI

It saved $3,000/month in billable hours. But the real win was Uniformity. Because every folder was named exactly the same, we could later build searching tools that instantly retrieved files across 5,000 cases.

The unsexy, "dumb" automation laid the foundation for the eventual "Smart AI Search" tool.

Lesson: You don't need a neural network. Sometimes you just need a mkdir command.