The First Thirty Days
2026-08-27 · Workplex · 6 min read · Onboarding, Pilot, Adoption
The question every managing partner asks before signing is some version of: what actually happens after we say yes? Not the pitch — the calendar. Here is what a pilot looks like, week by week, for a defense firm that starts on a Monday.
Week one: point at what is already coming in
Nothing is migrated in week one, because nothing has to be. The pipeline is pointed at live intake — the files already arriving this week — not at fifteen years of archive. A firm sees its first structured chronology on a real, current file before the first Friday.
Week two: the team starts correcting, not just watching
By the second week the novelty has worn off and the real test starts: reviewers correcting the machine's first-pass output the way they would correct a first-year's draft. Every correction is captured — not just applied and forgotten — because that correction is what starts tuning the system to how this firm actually wants its files read.
- Splitting and classification granularity get adjusted to match how this firm organizes a file.
- Extraction fields the firm cares about most get prioritized over the generic defaults.
- The reviewers doing the correcting are the same reviewers who will use the tool daily after the pilot — no separate pilot team to onboard twice.
Week three: the archive comes forward only when a case needs it
An old matter reopens, or a fact from a closed file matters again — and that one file gets pulled forward, read, and structured on demand. The rest of the archive keeps sitting exactly where it already was, migrating not at all, because a thirty-day pilot was never about proving the archive could move.
By week three the question stops being “does this work” and starts being “how much more of the file work can we hand over.”
Week four: the firm decides, not the calendar
The pilot has a thirty-day frame because a firm needs a real answer, not an open-ended trial that never resolves. But nothing forces a decision before the firm has seen enough — the old system keeps running the whole time, so there is no cliff to fall off if the answer is not yet clear. What ends in thirty days is the pilot. What starts, if the answer is yes, is exactly the workflow the firm has already been living in for three weeks — because it was never a different system to begin with.