On Monday, I launched a consultancy. Today, I'm reimagining it, and pointing it at the people who pay for legal rather than the people who practice it.
22 July 2026
On Monday, I launched a consultancy. Today, I'm reimagining it.
The consultancy was called Ariadni's Thread. I also own Ariadni, a tool for non-lawyers to assess the counsel they hire. The overlap didn't sit right with me (any advice I give is platform-agnostic), so I owned up to it.
Its new name is Ergane, Athena at her most industrious, the one the citizens of Athens prayed to when there was work to get done. Wisdom with her hands on the loom.
And while I was renaming it, I repointed it.
Ergane is a legal efficiency consultancy, and like Ariadni, Ergane is primarily for founders, CXOs, and owners: the people who pay for legal, not necessarily the people who practice it.
When a founder, CXO, or owner wants to know whether legal could be better, faster, and cheaper, they defer: to their head of legal, who let's face it is probably underwater keeping the business safe, or to outside counsel, who bills by the hour. Follow that thread to its natural end, to a meter.
Few of us who bill by the hour are incentivized to make the work move faster. Quite the opposite. The one person whose interests genuinely point at efficiency, the one signing the invoices, has been trained over decades to treat legal as a black box.
Deference feels like diligence, but compounds like neglect. It's why law firms can charge $2k/hour; what choice do you really have but to pay it?
As a practicing lawyer, I ran the experiment where deference was impossible: my own practice. Fine-tuning how my work gets done took my draft turnaround from about 12 hours to 2.6. Nearly 5x, documented. And it held.
Same AI models every firm has. Different incentive: to remove friction wherever it is found.
I should add that the extreme boost in productivity was admittedly unexpected. And what does one do when the same work gets done in ~20% of the time?
Well, whatever the heck I feel like doing, of course: Ergane, Ariadni, and perhaps one or two other often-mispronounced-Greek-goddess-themed projects (and wine-tasting, duh). But I digress.
Ergane. One weaver. The work of a team. Legal efficiency consulting.
Ergane opens the black box for the people paying for it: how the legal work flows, what it should cost, who should be doing it, and the technology under it all. Buy vs. build, vendor selection, builds and custom software, implementation, tuning, automation, training, and outside counsel negotiation and assessment, so you know whether your company actually has to pay $2k/hour.
Sign up for a free consultation at erganelegal.com.
Thirty minutes, your real workflow on the table or just a chat. You'll deal with Damian directly regardless. Tell him where it's stuck, and he'll come back to you with a proposal.