Creating a client agreement should take 2 minutes.

Creating a client agreement should take 2 minutes. At most RIAs, it takes 45.

The template exists. The client data exists. The fee schedule exists. They just live in three different places, and someone on the ops team has to open all of them, copy the right fields, paste them into the right document, and then manually queue it up in DocuSign.

That sequence happens dozens of times a month at a growing firm. At 600 clients, it does not stay manageable.

The better version: an advisor triggers a request, Claude pulls the client name, fee schedule, and account details from the systems that already hold them, populates the IMA template, and hands it to DocuSign to send. The ops person never touches a keyboard for the parts that do not require judgment.

The firms building toward this are not doing it because it is elegant. They are doing it because they want to run at 600 clients with the same headcount they had at 200. Every manual step that survives into that scaled version is a cost that compounds with AUM.

The data is already there. The tools already exist. The gap is the plumbing between them.