Legal briefs & cease-and-desist letters — create, complete, scale

With more than 120 lawyers across four locations, SKW Schwarz is one of Germany’s leading independent commercial law firms. In 2018 the firm founded SKW Schwarz @ Tech GmbH as its own legal-tech unit and has since pursued the digitalisation of legal work consistently.

In unfair-competition and trademark law, drafting cease-and-desist letters is core business. Clients report trademark violations and the firm creates the corresponding letters — with the right undertaking, correct cost calculations and all necessary attachments. At SKW Schwarz this is no longer a manual process; it is a collaboration between lawyer and COIA.

The workflow at SKW Schwarz shows how lawyer and AI collaborate in practice. The client sends information about a trademark violation by email — with documents, evidence, screenshots. The lawyer opens COIA, the UNOY chat, and drags the documents into the conversation. They select the right template for the cease-and-desist letter. And COIA creates the finished document: with the right undertaking, the correct costs and the matching attachments.

That sounds simple. The depth lies in the architecture behind it. COIA is not a chatbot that generates text. COIA is a chat that can call, operate and orchestrate workflows. Behind every cease-and-desist letter sit Skills — work instructions that define how COIA works. Which template applies when, how the cost calculation runs, which undertaking belongs to which type of violation, which attachments need to be added. The lawyer has control over these Skills and curates them on the substance.

For specialised violation types — such as particularly complex unfair-competition constellations — additional COIA agents are deployed. These are specialised extensions trained and configured for specific tasks. The lawyer decides when an agent is brought in. Responsibility always stays with the human.

First: chat is the right surface for legal work. Lawyers work with language — they formulate, argue, refine. A chat interface fits that way of working, because it joins natural interaction with structured execution. The lawyer doesn’t fill in a form or start a workflow manually. They speak with COIA, and COIA orchestrates.

Second: Skills are the key to quality assurance. The actual intelligence doesn’t sit in the AI — it sits in the Skills, the work instructions that define how COIA handles a specific case. Whoever curates the Skills controls the quality. That doesn’t make the lawyer redundant; it gives them a new role: instead of drafting every letter themselves, they curate the rules under which letters are produced.

Third: agents extend reach without giving up control. Not every trademark violation is the same. For specialised unfair-competition constellations the standard Skills are not enough. COIA agents take over those specialised tasks — but always under the lawyer’s supervision, always within the defined frame. That lets a firm efficiently handle cases that would otherwise only be tractable for the handful of specialists on the team.