How a small law firm can compete with a bigger one
Most articles answer this with survey results. Here is a better test. Take one real deadline and see who can meet it.
In Malaysia, when a client is served with an adjudication claim under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012, they have ten working days to serve the response. Working days means weekdays, less whatever public holidays apply in the state where the site sits. Call it two weeks, sometimes a little less than it looks on the calendar.
That one deadline explains most of what people mean when they talk about capacity.
What the deadline actually asks for
Your client has seen part of this before. There was a payment claim earlier, with ten working days to answer it. A party who said nothing at that point is treated as disputing the whole claim.
The adjudication claim is a different animal. This is where the full documentary case arrives. Progress claims, site instructions, variation records, certificates, minutes, and the email chain that explains why a sum was or was not certified. Someone has to read all of it before anyone can work out what the defence is.
Reading is not lawyering. It is what you do before you can lawyer. It is also the thing a bigger firm is buying when it puts four associates on the file and you have one and a half.
The clock does not stop there. The other side may reply within five working days. The adjudicator then has forty five working days to decide, and a decision delivered late is void. Nobody in the process gets extra time for being short staffed.
There is some relief available. The adjudicator has power under section 25(p) to extend time limits, and can limit how many documents the parties put in. Whether that power reaches the statutory response deadline is debatable, and in practice extensions are not routinely granted for it. Asking for relief also tells the other side something about how stretched you are.
One number from the AIAC report
The AIAC administers adjudication under the Act, and it publishes its caseload. In 2024 it received 965 matters. Adjudication made up 82 per cent of them, 792 cases, of which 626 were registered. Registered cases rose from 508 in 2022 to 568 in 2023 to 626 in 2024. The sums claimed went from about RM1.3 billion to about RM1.83 billion across those two years. Just under half of the work, 45 per cent, involved projects in the Klang Valley.
Now the figure that should interest a managing partner more than any of those.
In 2024, 66 per cent of respondents in these adjudications had no representation at all. Only 31 per cent instructed a law firm. Claimants behaved in the opposite way. Fifty eight per cent instructed firms, and another 32 per cent used adjudication consultants.
The report notes the split without explaining it. Cost is presumably part of the answer. But it is worth asking how much of it comes down to the ten day window. A respondent who rings a firm on day three of ten gets a price and a staffing answer that adds up to no, and carries on alone.
If that is even half right, there is real work here that nobody is doing, and the reason is operational rather than legal. Malaysian firms are not short of judgment. They are short of hands inside the window.
Where the maths actually changes
Picture a response file. This is an illustration rather than a statistic, but you will recognise it. A few thousand pages. Two lawyers genuinely free. Nine working days left.
The old version goes like this. Days one to five disappear into reading. The partner sees the shape of the defence somewhere around day six and starts making decisions with three days left to draft. That is why these files get finished at midnight, and why a firm with two free lawyers turns them down.
What AI changes here is narrow and worth stating precisely. It can index the bundle on a first pass. It can build a dated chronology of the payment history out of the documents themselves. It can compare what the payment response said against what the adjudication claim now asserts. It can produce a skeleton of the response from your own precedents instead of a blank page.
None of that decides anything. A lawyer reads all of it and answers for it. What changes is that the partner sees the defence on day two rather than day six. The days you get back are reading days, and reading was never the part the client was paying for.
That is the whole claim, and it is a smaller claim than the way this usually gets sold. A thirty five lawyer firm does not become a hundred lawyer firm. It becomes a thirty five lawyer firm that can say yes on day three of ten.
What this does not fix
Capacity is one of three reasons you lose work to a bigger firm, and it is not the biggest.
The second is panel access. Where the client is a listed developer or a bank, the instruction runs through a panel you may not be on, and being quicker does not put you on it. The third is cashflow, meaning the ability to carry work in progress on a heavy file for months. Both are structural, and AI does nothing about either.
So the honest version is a narrow one. AI lifts a capacity limit on work with big document sets and a hard deadline. It leaves the other two exactly where they were. A firm that adopts it expecting the panel seat to follow will be disappointed, and will blame the software.
One more risk is worth naming. A response filed in ten working days containing an unchecked assertion, or an authority nobody looked up, is worse than a late one. The same pressure that makes AI useful on this file is the pressure that tempts a team to skip the review. A short deadline does not soften your professional obligations, which is the ground covered in the earlier piece on whether Malaysian lawyers can use AI in 2026. Speed only helps if someone still reads the output.
A better question for your disputes team
Not "should we use AI". Ask this instead. Over the last two years, which files did we turn down only because of the window?
Not the ones outside your expertise. Not the conflicts. The ones where the firm knew exactly what to do and did not have the people to do it in time.
If that list is empty, capacity is not your constraint, and you should go and look at panel access instead. If the list is long, you have found your business case, and it is a good deal more concrete than anything in a vendor deck.
So which is it at your firm, and when did you last actually count?
Auxilator helps boutique law firms in Malaysia adopt AI safely, inside the firm's existing Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, grounded in the firm's own precedents, with lawyers reviewing every output and no training on client data. If you are thinking about this carefully, feel free to connect or send a message.
Sources
Every deadline and power described above comes from the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (Act 746). Definition of working day, section 4. Payment response and the effect of not serving one, sections 6(3) and 6(4). When a dispute may be referred, section 7(2). Adjudication claim, section 9(1). Adjudication response, section 10(1). Reply, section 11(1). The adjudicator's decision and the consequence of delivering it late, sections 12(2) and 12(3). The adjudicator's power to extend time and to limit documents, sections 25(p) and 25(a). Full text of the Act: https://www.adjudication.org/sites/default/files/CIPAA%20Act%20746%20ENGLISH.pdf
Caseload and representation figures are from the Asian International Arbitration Centre, Annual Report 2024. Exact figures as published: 965 matters received in 2024; adjudication 82.07 per cent, being 792 cases, of which 166 were pre registered and 626 registered; registered adjudication cases 508 in 2022, 568 in 2023 and 626 in 2024; sums claimed RM1,301,310,974.28 in 2023 and RM1,830,809,098.59 in 2024; 45.36 per cent of cases concerned projects in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur; respondents 66.40 per cent unrepresented and 31.50 per cent represented by law firms; claimants 57.83 per cent law firms and 32.11 per cent adjudication consultants. Report: https://admin.aiac.world/uploads/ckupload/ckupload_20251226045916_72.pdf
The Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication (Amendment) Act 2024 (Act A1738) replaces references to the KLRCA with the AIAC. It makes no change to any of the deadlines above: https://admin.aiac.world/uploads/ckupload/ckupload_20251224054209_39.pdf
