AI tool Vero aims to bring down legal costs for small businesses

As a small business owner, Royce Sin is blunt about his frustration with getting legal advice. Costs add up quickly, he said, because lawyers bill for “every small thing.”

A month ago, through word of mouth, Mr. Sin found an AI tool that professed to handle human resources, legal and finance work for small businesses at a flat fee. “I decided to give it a shot. You pose your question to the AI agent, it gives you guided and structured advice, and then finds a human expert for you to consult with.

The agent, Vero, is the brainchild of Vancouver-based entrepreneur Aaren Terrett, who founded Vistera.ai last year, just as the legal AI market began to go mainstream, driven by widespread adoption of legal AI platforms such as Harvey and Clio, a Canadian company. Vero is LLM agnostic, meaning that it can work with any large language model, and was developed in-house by Vistera engineers.

Vistera is attempting to disrupt the market for small business lawyers by selling an AI tool that will effectively perform basic legal work for employers at a cost far less than what they would pay a law firm. Vero can now be accessed by small businesses in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta.

Vistera itself has a close relationship with a full-service law firm, the Spraggs Group, in Coquitlam, B.C, where Mr. Terrett is president and chief operating officer.

“As a small business law firm ourselves, we found that legal work was incredibly costly for things that only seemed to require a small amount of an actual lawyer’s time. We also noticed that clients would avoid getting legal advice because of the costs. I figured there had to be a better way,” Mr. Terrett said.

With the right prompts, Vero can draft employment agreements, review contracts, put together reports on growth plans, conduct business health checks, among other tasks, according to Mr. Terrett. Vero’s work is vetted by an actual lawyer, accountant or HR professional before it is sent back to the client. Often, all this work is done on the same day.

Writing a will? Don’t trust a chatbot to do the grunt work, estate lawyers say

Within four weeks of launching Vero, Vistera signed on 25 small business clients and now employs approximately 70 lawyers, HR and accounting professionals behind the scenes to help vet the work.

Mr. Terrett noted that no piece of work performed by Vero gets to a client before it is vetted by an actual human, because errors can still take place. The advantage of Vistera’s product, according to Mr. Terrett, is that it is simply faster and cheaper.

Mr. Sin, also based in Vancouver, runs a tech consulting company, Kinesin, which offers advice to other small businesses on AI systems and data integration. He has plans to expand his business this year, alongside launching a new software product and will rely heavily on Vero to assist him with legal, finance and HR paperwork. The critical factor for Mr. Sin throughout this process is predictability of cost. “I can plan out how much it will cost to review contracts and onboard new employees because it is one flat fee for using Vero,” he said.

Vistera only charges clients when the job is done, regardless of how long it took to complete the task, according to Mr. Terrett. An example of how using Vero is cheaper: Creating or redlining a contract often requires signing a retainer fee with a law firm. A lawyer might charge upwards of $600 an hour for the work, which, perhaps, takes three hours, Mr. Terrett said. Vistera will use Vero for all initial document intake, creation, first draft redlining and then present its work to the human lawyer in the loop, who will then complete and sign off on the contract. A client will be charged between $500 and $700 for that work, in addition to saving on the prepaid retainer fee.

Critics of legal AI, however, have warned that the technology is still in its infancy and not close to being able to replicate much of the work that lawyers do. Popular legal AI products on the market such as Harvey have been used by lawyers for years, mainly to speed up research and perform the work of legal assistants and paralegals, but lawyers still have to review their work.

Among Canada’s lawyers, the jury is still out on AI

“They simply do not help in the thinking and analyzing part of the job,” said Jonathan Kleiman, a Toronto-based lawyer who runs his own firm and works mainly with small business owners. Mr. Kleiman said clients often come to him with research and drafts done by ChatGPT, asking if he can just review the work and offer them a discount. “And I look at what ChatGPT has done and it’s garbage. So it’s actually more work for me.”

Mr. Kleiman, however, believes that with the advent of tools such as Vistera’s AI agent, the model of clients being billed by the hour will eventually change. “Hourly billing will become too expensive for clients when they know lawyers and firms are doing the work quickly with the help of AI,” he said. Mr. Kleiman himself charges clients a flat fee, and said that he’s managed to maintain a steady stream of customers over the past 15 years.

As AI tools become a greater part of the legal profession, the Law Society of Ontario has set up a Futures committee tasked with understanding the impact of generative and agentic AI on the work of lawyers.

Quinn Ross, the co-chair of the committee, said that one of his biggest concerns with the use of AI in legal work is confirmation bias.

“The machine is receiving data from the client, framed by the client. So you have a scope problem at the front end with the client. Is the machine capable of making a determination of whether the legal issue at hand is simple or complex? Ascertaining that should be preferably done by a lawyer in the loop.”