ikaun Helps Am Law 100 Firm GRSM Cut Proposal Time by 50% in Four Months

The BD Problem at Scale

Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani is an Am Law 100 firm with more than 1,800 attorneys across 85+ offices in all 50 states. Its marketing and BD team handles approximately 200 pitchbooks and RFPs per year—nearly one every business day. At that volume, process efficiency is not a preference; it is essential.

Brittany Summers, Marketing Manager at GRSM, owns much of that portfolio. As the firm continues to grow and demand increases, she recognized an opportunity to evolve the firm’s proposal infrastructure, moving from a time-intensive, manually driven process to a more streamlined and sustainable approach.

The Before State

Before ikaun, every pitchbook was assembled manually—attorney bios and practice overviews pulled from individual Word documents, copied, pasted, and incorporated one at a time. A straightforward pitch with multiple practices and attorney bios could take up to an hour. An RFP could require a week or more of focused effort, often pulling resources away from other priorities.

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Beyond process inefficiency, there was an opportunity to strengthen data accuracy and consistency. Bios updated on the website did not automatically flow back into Word documents, resulting in multiple content sources rather than a single record. Verification remained important, but required manual effort.

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The firm’s trial experience presented a similar opportunity. More than 1,100 matters tracked in a spreadsheet existed outside of proposal workflows – limiting searchability and accessibility. Incorporating trial experience into a pitch or RFP again required a manual effort.

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“This was about selecting a platform that could scale with the firm and deliver measurable results from day one. ikaun has done exactly that by enhancing efficiency, improving consistency, and strengthening how we support business development across our 50-state platform. It also allows us to leverage AI by building from a centralized library of approved responses and tailoring them to each opportunity. Brittany led a thoughtful evaluation and implementation process in partnership with the ikaun team, which has been instrumental in the success we’re seeing today.” Heather Shearer, Chief Marketing Officer

Why ikaun

With a clear opportunity to modernize and scale its proposal process, Brittany spent nearly a year evaluating the full market before committing to a solution.

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She was methodical about it—assessing platforms across the full spectrum, from enterprise-level pitch automation systems to lightweight AI tools—and she had a clear framework for what she was looking for: something the team could get up and running quickly, that solved the immediate proposal needs, and that had the capability to scale with the firm’s rapid growth.

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The enterprise-level platforms she evaluated offered broad capabilities but introduced additional considerations. Implementation complexity, longer timelines to value, and broader requirements in terms of IT involvement, data preparation, and change management made them less aligned with the firm’s immediate priorities. The lightweight alternatives presented a different trade-off.  They offered faster development but lacked the long-term scalability needed to support a growing, high-volume proposal function.

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ikaun provided the right balance, purpose-built for the proposal generation, while offering the flexibility to expand into experience management, financial system integration, and business development analytics over time—all of it was available when the firm was ready for it, not forced on them at implementation.

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ikaun’s Answer Agent capability also aligned with a key forward-looking priority: AI-assisted RFP response. The volume of RFPs was increasing, the timelines were compressing, and the team saw an opportunity to build and leverage a library of approved content without starting from scratch on every engagement.

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ikaun made it possible to advance both the proposal efficiency objective and the AI-assisted response objective on a single platform—without requiring separate investments or implementations.

Implementation

With a vendor selected, GRSM moved quickly. The deployment ran four months with a go-live in November 2025, structured in two phases: an immediate focus on proposals, pitches, and AI-assisted RFP response, followed by an expansion into full experience management.

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As part of Phase 1, ikaun was configured to scrape attorney bios directly from GRSM’s website— eliminating the Word document dependency entirely. Practice group overviews required a custom configuration: the public website versions alone weren’t sufficient for competitive pitches, so ikaun was built to pull from a pitch-specific version that includes representative experience not published externally.

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Alongside the proposal configuration, GRSM migrated its trial history into ikaun’s Trial Tracker. The spreadsheet—which referenced over a thousand trials, (Judges, opposing counsel, etc.) dating back to 2015—was cleaned, mapped, and imported. The data work was significant: the file had accumulated roughly 22 distinct hearing type values that had to be consolidated and standardized before import. The result is a decade of litigation experience that is now searchable, filterable, confidentiality-flagged where appropriate, and available to surface in proposals. The spreadsheet is gone.

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Where possible, GRSM leverages ikaun’s Answer Agent and Official Answers functionality—uploading RFP documents into a dedicated workspace and drawing on a growing library of firm-approved boilerplate. The team previously had to pull answers from Risk Management, HR, and other departments for each engagement. That dependency hasn’t been eliminated entirely, but the library is reducing it systematically with AI-assistance.

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Phase 2 will connect ikaun to other GRSM systems, unlocking the full experience database capability. That integration will close the loop between matter data and proposal content—enabling the team to surface verified, finance-system-sourced experience directly in pitches and RFPs without manual data entry or spreadsheet maintenance. As part of a phased implementation strategy, the firm prioritized launching Phase 1 to deliver immediate value, with Phase 2 integration planned as a next step. The foundation is in place.

Results

Four months into using the platform, the results at GRSM are significant and measurable. The firm has completed approximately 60 proposals through ikaun, cutting proposal  generation time by more than 50 percent. Pitches that previously took up to an hour to assemble can now be generated in minutes, shifting time away from manual production and toward tailoring content to the specific opportunity.

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The efficiency gains have enabled broader team participation in proposal development. Work that was previously concentrated among a small group is now more evenly distributed, strengthening scalability, reducing dependency, and improving overall responsiveness.

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Data quality has improved by design. Ikaun acts as a centralized source of truth that pulls attorney bios directly from the firm’s website— eliminating the need for parallel Word documents and reducing manual updates. Partners have noticed: attorneys are commenting on faster turnaround, and the recent rebrand templates transferred cleanly, so speed has not come at the expense of presentation.

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The Trial Tracker migration has enabled GRSM to fully leverage its litigation data. More than a decade of trial experience is now searchable and available in proposals. And ikaun’s reporting tools are giving the team a structured path to connecting proposal activity to business development outcomes— streamlining what was previously a highly manual, time-intensive process.

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“With ikaun, we reduced proposal generation time by over 50% in the first quarter following go-live. Pitches that used to take significant time to compile can now be generated in minutes — and it's not just the speed. The platform is so intuitive that the whole team is now able to execute proposals which has improved how we operate. We've built a strong library of approved content that's reducing our silos of information and improving efficiency. We also have a decade of litigation data now working for us within proposals, and the platform just keeps delivering. I've worked with a lot of vendors over the years. The ikaun team is different — responsive, committed, and still with us long after implementation. We haven't scratched the surface of what ikaun can do for our firm, and I can't wait to see where it takes us next."

— Brittany Summers, Marketing Manager, GRSM