Legal technology often promises efficiency yet leaves lawyers adapting their work to fit rigid software. Project Fortress took the opposite route: It began inside an active legal practice, shaped by the pressures of high volume transactional work and refined through daily use by attorneys at an Am Law 100 firm.

Today, Project Fortress is a legal operations platform designed to bring structure, visibility, and intelligence to complex legal work. Its foundation reflects the environment that produced it: fast moving transactions, large deal teams, and clients managing multiple matters at once.

A Platform Born in the Deal Surge

The origins of Project Fortress trace back to the extraordinary M&A cycle of 2021. Transaction volumes surged across industries while legal teams relied on tools that had changed little in decades.

Closing checklists lived in Word documents and spreadsheets. Key communications moved through long email chains. Institutional knowledge from prior transactions remained scattered across shared drives or buried in individual inboxes.

Collen Steffen, then an M&A attorney, experienced these constraints daily while managing active deals. The complexity of the work itself was expected. The challenge was the operational structure supporting it.

Deal teams spent significant time organizing information rather than analyzing it. Every new matter required rebuilding processes that had already been used many times before.

Steffen began developing a system that would organize matters in a consistent format, capture knowledge as work occurred, and give legal teams a centralized view of the transaction lifecycle. What started as a practical solution inside one legal practice expanded into the foundation of Project Fortress.

Building Legal Infrastructure on Salesforce

Project Fortress was designed as infrastructure rather than a point tool. The platform runs on Salesforce, providing an enterprise grade environment for structuring legal data and workflows.

Using this foundation, the Fortress platform brings together the systems attorneys already rely on. Integrations connect Fortress with document management systems such as iManage and NetDocuments, productivity tools within Microsoft 365, and collaboration platforms used by deal teams and clients.

Instead of replacing these systems, Fortress organizes them around a single operational framework. Matters, tasks, communications, diligence materials, and transaction data exist within one environment.

Interactive deal checklists and playbooks guide matters from initiation through closing. Communication channels remain tied to specific matters so teams retain context throughout the lifecycle of a transaction.

This structure produces a single source of truth for legal operations. Attorneys and clients gain real time visibility into the status of deals, milestones, and outstanding tasks.

For private equity clients and portfolio companies managing serial acquisitions, this structure supports coordination across multiple transactions occurring at the same time.

Structured Data as the Foundation for Legal AI

Once legal work becomes structured within a platform, another capability emerges. Artificial intelligence can operate with far greater accuracy when it draws from organized legal data rather than isolated documents.

Project Fortress introduced its AI framework directly inside the platform environment. In this model, the structured data generated by ongoing matters provides the context for AI analysis.

The system can review thousands of discovery and diligence documents and generate actionable work product in hours instead of weeks. Diligence reviews can convert into organized summaries and charts that support decision making. Large markups become detailed issues lists with built in market analysis, recommendations, and drafting guidance. Deal studies can analyze trends across a firm’s own historical transactions.

Because the system operates inside the matter environment, results remain connected to client specific workflows and precedent. Attorneys remain in control of the process while automation reduces the time spent on repetitive review and synthesis.

The approach treats AI as a component of legal operations rather than a separate tool.

Tested Inside an Am Law 100 Firm

Project Fortress moved from concept to operational platform through its adoption at Polsinelli. The firm became the first Am Law firm to implement the platform across multiple transactional and litigation practice groups.

Hundreds of attorneys and client teams now use Fortress to manage matters ranging from M&A, litigation and real estate transactions to venture capital, debt finance, and regulatory work.

The platform integrates with the firm’s existing technology stack and supports collaboration between attorneys and clients across the deal lifecycle.

For clients pursuing acquisition strategies that involve multiple deals at once, Fortress provides visibility into how those transactions progress from sourcing through integration. Legal teams can monitor milestones, coordinate diligence, and track the evolution of deal terms across a portfolio of matters.

This environment allows legal work to align more closely with the operational strategy of the business itself.

The Future of Legal Operations

Project Fortress began as an attempt to bring order to the operational challenges of modern legal practice. Its continued development reflects a broader shift within the profession.

Law firms and corporate legal departments increasingly require platforms that organize knowledge, coordinate teams, and generate insights from their own work product.

When legal operations become structured, technology can support analysis, planning, and collaboration at a far deeper level.

Project Fortress represents one example of this direction. Built by practicing lawyers and tested within the workflows of an Am Law 100 firm, the platform illustrates how legal technology can evolve when it begins inside the practice of law itself.

Meet Project Fortress at Legalweek: Booth 410.