Customer Stories
The research layer that used to take days now takes an hour
Legal research, regulatory analysis, risk assessment, and in-house counsel at the speed of the business
For most of his career, Markus Hartman operated in a legal environment that ran on a familiar rhythm. A question surfaced from the business. Research was assigned, analysis was assembled and guidance was delivered. Somewhere between the intake, the research, the drafting, and the final advice, days passed. Sometimes a week.
At Slingshot Aerospace, that rhythm does not hold. The company operates in one of the most technically complex and rapidly evolving regulatory environments in any industry: space technology, dual-use systems, government contracting, export controls, and the intersection of commercial and defense interests. Legal questions at Slingshot do not arrive with generous timelines. They arrive alongside engineering decisions and business conversations that are already moving.
As Senior VP of Legal, Markus is responsible for keeping pace with that environment without a legal department scaled to match it. The challenge is not the depth of the issues but the cost of getting from a question to a defensible answer before the business needs to move on.
That cost, for most of his career, was measured in days. After Ruli, it is measured in hours.
The conventional response to a growing legal workload is a growing legal team. More lawyers, more paralegals, more outside counsel relationships. At Slingshot, that answer was never going to be sufficient on its own. The range of legal issues the business confronts, from spectrum rights and satellite licensing to government procurement and global deals, spans multiple disciplines that no single hire can cover.
What Markus recognized was that the real constraint was not expertise. It was the research layer underneath every legal judgment call. Before any analysis could begin, someone had to find the relevant statutes, locate the applicable regulatory guidance, surface recent enforcement trends, and construct the factual and legal framework that would allow a trained lawyer to actually advise. That work was consuming hours that belonged elsewhere.
Outside counsel could absorb it, at a cost. Internal research could address it, at a pace. Neither answer was satisfying for a business that needed legal to move at operational speed.
Ruli changed the equation by compressing that first layer significantly.
What distinguishes effective legal AI use from ineffective use is not the tool. It is the structure of the process around the tool.
Markus approaches Ruli the way a senior lawyer approaches a research assistant: with a specific question, meaningful context, and a clear standard for what a useful output looks like. A legal question does not go in raw. It goes in with the relevant background, the business objective, the jurisdictional constraints, and a clear articulation of what decision the research needs to support.
What comes back is not a final answer. It is an oriented starting point: the applicable framework, the relevant authorities, the areas of genuine uncertainty, and the questions worth escalating. That output becomes the foundation for actual legal judgment, not a substitute for it.
The distinction matters. A research summary that tells a lawyer what the law says is useful. A research summary that tells a lawyer where the law is unsettled, where enforcement has been active, and where the practical risk is different from the theoretical risk is what Ruli provides. At Slingshot, where the regulatory environment changes frequently and the consequences of misjudgment are significant, that level of grounding is not optional.
The most immediate effect of compressing the research layer is speed. Legal questions that previously required a day or more of preliminary work before substantive analysis could begin now reach the analysis stage in a fraction of that time. For a business operating on engineering timelines and contract windows, that difference is not incremental. It determines whether legal is part of the decision or a report on it afterward.
But the more significant change is what Markus can now do with the time recovered. The research that Ruli handles efficiently is the research that used to crowd out everything else: the strategic conversations, the proactive risk assessments, the legal input on business decisions before those decisions are made rather than after. Senior legal time is most valuable when it is applied to judgment, not assembly. Ruli moves the work to the right place.
There is also a confidence effect. When Markus goes into a conversation with the business, he goes in with a more complete picture of the legal landscape than would have been practical to assemble on the same timeline without Ruli. That preparation changes the quality of the advice, not just the speed of its delivery.
Markus is precise about what Ruli does and does not change. The research arrives faster and with more structure than it would from a traditional process. But the legal judgment, the risk assessment, the advice to the business: those remain with the lawyer.
That clarity matters particularly at Slingshot. In a highly regulated, dual-use technology environment, the consequences of a poorly framed legal position are not abstract. Regulatory exposure, export control liability, and government contract risk require legal conclusions that a lawyer is prepared to defend. Ruli accelerates the path to that conclusion. It does not reach it.
What it does is ensure that when Markus arrives at a legal judgment, he has covered the ground. The relevant authorities have been identified. The areas of uncertainty have been surfaced. The practical risk has been separated from the theoretical one. The judgment is better informed because the research was faster and more thorough than the available time would otherwise have allowed.
The economics are equally clear. Research questions that would have generated hours of outside counsel time now stay in-house, handled at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time. The outside counsel relationship shifts from handling routine research to handling the matters that genuinely require it.
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