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Atwood & Palmer, Inc. is a registered investment advisory firm based in Kansas City, Missouri, managing over $2 billion in assets. With a team of nine, Teresa Burch serves as both Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Operating Officer, a dual role that makes every hour of reclaimed time count twice.
The Challenge: Locked Into a Legacy System
For years, Atwood & Palmer's compliance review ran on an established platform that hadn't kept pace with the rules it was meant to support. "Their system is archaic. They had not had any major updates," said Teresa.
Each week, Teresa worked through hundreds of flagged items - the majority of them marketing addresses, no-reply senders, and automated notifications with zero compliance value. Suppressing a single address meant copying it into a separate file format, completing the audit, then copying it back into a different part of the system. The review process took up two hours a week, just for email, and adding channels meant more queues and more of the same.
Leaving carried its own cost. Exiting required paying for a five-year static archive contract, with one year rolling off at a time - the longer a firm stays, the more expensive the exit becomes. "It's gonna cost you an exorbitant amount of money to get out of there," Teresa warns. Leadership wasn't prepared to wait, especially once they'd become aware of a ‘far more productive' platform that would make the switch worthwhile.
The Solution: Intelligent Filtering Built Into the Review Queue
Atwood & Palmer moved to MirrorWeb roughly three years ago, and now archives email, Teams, LinkedIn, text messaging, and their website, through a single, unified platform. The improvement was immediately apparent.
"With our previous provider, email review took up an exorbitant amount of time. MirrorWeb changed that with automatic marketing address filtering. Now, with Sentinel AI, it's a whole different animal because those emails don't even appear in the first place."
Where the earlier approach still required some degree of manual management, Sentinel AI removes irrelevant communications before they reach the reviewer at all. What remains is a queue of messages that warrant genuine attention.
Sentinel AI is also designed to show its working: every flagging and filtering decision is explainable and auditable, not a black-box output. For Teresa, that matters as much as the time saving. "Being transparent and able to document everything is what the SEC requires."
The Impact: From Hundreds of Alerts to 30 Minutes a Week
The before-and-after is measurable. Before MirrorWeb Teresa's weekly email compliance review consumed ‘a couple of hours’. Today, with more channels in scope - including Teams and website archiving - the same review takes less than 30 minutes, largely thanks to Sentinel AI. Atwood & Palmer has cut their review time by 75% while expanding coverage. "We've added website plus we added Teams, and I'm still under that 30-minute time frame."
Volume has dropped from roughly a couple of hundred flagged items per week to around 24, and the character of the queue has shifted. "Now there's less of them, and they are definitely more meaningful".
For Teresa, the reclaimed time flows directly into strategic work: evaluating AI tools, overseeing IT infrastructure changes, planning website development. Compliance review that once consumed hours of her week has become capacity for work that shapes the firm's direction, and Teresa is clear that the calculus only gets more compelling for bigger firms "There's only 9 of us now. If you have hundreds of people, that's a different conversation."
Asked what separates MirrorWeb from the providers that came before it, Teresa was unambiguous. "I was naturally sceptical of the use of AI in compliance, but the value of Sentinel AI is obvious. It’s just light years beyond what we’ve had before. To go from hours to minutes from a compliance standpoint when reviewing emails and text messages - it's a massive saver."