The Origins of Project Fortress: Built by Lawyers, For Lawyers

Every company has an origin story. Ours doesn’t start with a brilliant product idea sketched on a whiteboard—it starts with the chaos of practicing M&A during the deal frenzy of 2020 and 2021.

Living the Chaos

Those years were some of the busiest transaction cycles in recent memory. Deals were moving at breakneck speed, but the way we worked behind the scenes felt like a throwback to another era.

I was spending my days buried in diligence and transaction documents scattered across spreadsheets, redlines, and endless email chains. Closing checklists—the lifeblood of any deal—lived in static Word or Excel files that were out of date as soon as they were circulated.

We had precedent and market knowledge, but it was effectively lost in silos: locked in a shared drive, buried in someone’s inbox, or worse, stored only in the memory of whoever happened to be on the deal team last time.

And every client team worked differently, which meant every new matter felt like reinventing the wheel.

What struck me most wasn’t that the work was complex—that’s the nature of M&A. It was that so much of our energy was going to managing chaos rather than driving strategy. Our operating model simply wasn’t built for the scale, speed, or expectations of modern legal work.

From Pain Point to Platform

That’s when the idea began to take shape: law didn’t just need better technology—it needed better infrastructure.

Before AI could be useful, we needed a system that could:

• Organize every matter consistently, across practice groups and clients.

• Integrate seamlessly with the tools attorneys already relied on.

• Structure data as work was happening, so knowledge wasn’t lost in the shuffle but captured and reusable.

That was the spark for what became Project Fortress.

Why Salesforce

When I decided to build Fortress, I knew it needed a foundation that was both secure and scalable. That’s why we partnered with Salesforce.

Salesforce gave us what law firms had never truly had: a flexible, enterprise-grade backbone for structuring data and workflows. On top of that, we built a matter management platform designed specifically for law firms, corporate legal departments, and even lean C-suites.

From the start, Fortress was designed as a one-stop shop:

• Integrations with iManage and NetDocuments for document management.

• Integration with Microsoft 365 for email and calendars.

• Slack and Chatter for client and specialist communications.

• Interactive checklists and playbooks to keep every matter moving forward.

The goal wasn’t to replace the tools firms were already using—it was to bring them together into a single source of truth.

Fortress AI: Adding Intelligence on Top

Once the platform was in place, the next step became obvious: add intelligence.

But I knew from my own experience that generic, off-the-shelf AI wouldn’t cut it. Those tools didn’t understand how lawyers actually worked, and they couldn’t account for firm-specific precedent or workflows.

So we built the Fortress AI agentic framework—a proprietary system of AI agents tied directly into the Fortress platform. In this setup, the structured data inside Fortress becomes the AI’s “first-level brain.”

This is why Fortress AI can do things no generic AI tool can:

• Run deal studies and market analysis directly from a firm’s own transactions.

• Generate issues lists from 100-page redlines in minutes, with client-specific context layered in.

• Turn diligence reviews into actionable charts and memos automatically.

• Power litigation workflows like argument analyzers, discovery generators, and case evaluators—each grounded in the actual record, not abstract models.

The result isn’t AI that feels like a chatbot. It feels like a colleague—one trained on how your firm works.

Where We Are Today

Fast forward to today: Fortress is being used by hundreds of attorneys and clients across practice groups—M&A, real estate, funds, venture capital, debt finance, litigation, energy, IP, and more.

Clients are closing faster. Firms are reducing diligence hours by more than 80%, cutting drafting time by 30%, and shortening deal cycles so that business strategy can move at the pace the market demands.

But our mission hasn’t changed. Fortress started as a way to bring structure to chaos. Today, it’s about replacing that chaos with clarity, proactivity, and intelligence across every corner of the practice of law.

That’s our origin story—and it’s the future we’re building toward every day.

— Collen Steffen, Founder & CEO