Most law firms can tell you what they billed on a matter. Far fewer can tell you why: what drove the cost, what the work was worth, or whether the next proposal should look anything like the last one.
Narrative is an AI-native pricing and matter intelligence platform for law firms. Its founder, John Tertan, trained and practiced at a Magic Circle firm where the same problem kept surfacing: data no one could leverage, RFP responses assembled by hand the night before a deadline, and real money written off because no one caught it in time. He built Narrative with his co-founder, Mustapha Ben Chaaben, an AI engineer with over a decade spent making large-scale systems work.
The numbers behind the problem are worse than most firms admit. Firms write off close to 18% of the work they bill. A single RFP can swallow 20+ hours of senior, non-chargeable time and still lead to teams winning less than one in five deals. Today, the problem is compounded further because firms have no good answer to the questions clients have about how AI will impact their estimate.
Narrative works in three layers, built to work together.
- It turns a firm's historical matters into structured, comparable profiles, so years of messy time entries and financials become data the team can actually use.
- It generates data-driven RFP and pricing responses, modeling rates, staffing, and fee arrangements in real time, and factoring in how AI tooling is changing the cost of the work.
- It tracks matters as they run, with live WIP against budget, automated OCG compliance, and overruns caught before they become write-offs.
Each layer feeds the next. Better data sharpens the pricing, and watching the work play out feeds better data back in. Most tools do one slice of this. None do all three on a single source of truth.
Most pricing tools added AI to an existing product. Narrative was built around it from the start, so the intelligence is structural rather than a layer on top, and the lead grows with each new generation of models. It also shows firms what their AI investment is doing to the economics of a matter before they price it, rather than leaving them to guess. And it stays independent: onboarding takes 24 hours from a CSV export, there's no lock-in, and it works with whatever practice management system a firm already runs.
Firms using Narrative lift realization rates by 2-4% and win around 10% more new work. Those gains come from pricing on evidence instead of instinct.
Narrative is built by practitioners and backed by people who have run the firms it serves. Its advisers include Eric Friedman, former chairman and CEO of Skadden; Nikki Shaver, founder of Legaltech Hub; and Hélder Santos, head of legal technology and innovation at Bird & Bird, among other Tier 1 advisers. In its first year, AM Law 50 firms have already come knocking.