What I did not have was a system for tracking my own business expenses.
This is the part where, in a properly written origin story, I would tell you that I sat down with a yellow legal pad, a strong coffee, and the steady hand of someone who has done this many times before. But this is not what happened. It was far less dramatic. I just opened a chat window and typed, in roughly these words: I have started a business. I have receipts. I do not know what to do with them. Help.
Part of me wanted to see what would happen if I did not spoon-feed it. And the AI, with no apparent judgement at all, helped. We discussed (and yes, I said discussed) what I needed, and built an expense tracker together. It has three tabs: Expenses, Summary, and Notes. New Zealand GST is handled at fifteen percent, calculated automatically by the slightly mystical formula of amount times three over twenty-three — a sentence which, if I had said it to my pre-AI self six months ago, would have sounded weird, even cultic. The tracker contains categories that matched what I spend money on. A summary tab that does the maths so I do not have to. A notes tab for the things you always think you will remember and then immediately forget.
It took roughly forty minutes, mostly because of that discussion I mentioned, and during this time the AI schooled me. Not in a bad way. It was guiding me, explaining what I could do from my end to refine what I wanted and how to go about getting it. I will be honest: it was fantastic. It would have taken me a weekend on my own, and the result would have been worse. Usually, this is the part where I am supposed to make a sweeping claim about how AI is going to transform everything, but I am not going to do that. Mostly because I do not entirely believe it. And besides, there are enough of those posts floating about and I am sure you are tired of them.
What I will say is this.
The expense tracker is not the point. The expense tracker is the proof of concept.
Let me explain. The point is that there is a particular category of task that is not particularly glamorous, and not strategic either, but necessary. It is small and recurring and very administrative in flavour. This category eats at your week, incessantly and without end. It places an obligation on you that, if left too long to its own devices, will spiral out of control. And AI is genuinely, properly good at reining it in. Whether it is tracking expenses, recording time spent on a client's file, drafting a form letter you have rewritten a dozen times despite working from a template, or summarising a long document into the three things you actually need to know — AI can earn its keep. After all, it is but a tool. It can build a checklist in seconds for something you do every month and have never bothered to systematise because it never seemed worth the effort.
These tasks are the hidden tax on professional life. They are not why you became a lawyer, or a manager, or a consultant. They are the reason you finish work on Friday feeling tired but not quite sure what you actually achieved. This is part of the gap Lex Praxis is built to address. Not the dramatic stuff. Not AI replacing lawyers, not AI predicting case outcomes, not the headlines. The quieter, more useful question: what is the task you do every week that you wish took less time, and could AI help with it?
When I ask that question of practising lawyers (and I have started asking), the answer is almost never "I want AI to argue my case for me." It is almost always something smaller, more human, and more solvable. Drafting performance improvement plans. Summarising mediation files. Writing the same redundancy letter for the fortieth time. Finding the relevant ERA authority on a point they half-remember.
These are real problems. They have real time costs. And they are, mostly, the kinds of problems AI can help with — provided someone with the relevant know-how is sitting in the chair, watching what it produces, and knowing when to say: no, that is not right, try again.
That is what I am building Lex Praxis to do. Help lawyers and employers find the boring tasks that matter, hand them the right tool, and keep the human judgement exactly where it needs to be — at the wheel, not on the assembly line.
Anyway. The expense tracker works. The receipts are in order. The GST calculates itself. And next month, when I have to do my first proper reconciliation, I will not have to think about the formula at all.
Which, frankly, is the entire pitch.