What Happens When Your Legal Niche Gets Wiped Out? | Alexander Licznerski

Most lawyers assume their niche is safe.

Until one day… it isn’t.

A law changes. A rule shifts. And suddenly, the work you’ve spent years mastering starts to disappear.

That’s exactly what happened to Alexander.

He had a dream job. He was in the top tier of earners at one of the largest personal injury firms in the country, building his career around PIP litigation.

Then Florida tort reform hit.

And just like that, the pipeline dried up.

This episode is about what comes next when that happens.

We talk about the moment you realize the ground has shifted under your feet, the decision to walk away from something that was working, and what it really feels like to start over from scratch.

There’s no clean playbook here. No overnight success story.

Just the reality of rebuilding. Learning a new practice. Taking hits. And finding your footing again.

If you’ve ever thought your practice was stable, or if you’ve been quietly wondering what you would do if everything changed tomorrow, this conversation will stick with you.

Because the real question isn’t whether change is coming.

It’s whether you’re ready for it.

Connect with Alexander

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-licznerski/
Website: https://www.licznerskilaw.com/

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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia.  He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field.  This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

Want to connect with Brian?

Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
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Transcript

The 11-Cent Case That Sparked Reform

SPEAKER_02 0:00

And um I remember the governor saying, you know, we had a case where eleven cents in interest was owed by the insurance company. The case went all the way up, you know, to I don't know, like a district court of appeal. The plaintiff's attorney, you know, they won. And when I say plaintiff's attorney, what I really mean is the insured, right? The insured won. And so they got the eleven cents, but the attorney got like 450,000 in attorney's fees.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

And look, I I get the optics. Well, that's exactly right.

A Practice Area Disappears Overnight

SPEAKER_04 0:27

Hey friends, welcome to Life Beyond the Briefs, the podcast for lawyers who are building a life and a practice they actually want to show up to on Mondays. Let me ask you something. What would you do if the thing you built your entire career on just disappeared? Uh, that's exactly what happened to today's guest. Alexander had a dream job, a top performer, top income, working inside one of the biggest firms in the country. And then Florida tort reform hit, and almost overnight, the work that made his career is gone. So he had a choice stay stuck or start over. He chose to start over. And this episode is about what that actually looks like the uncertainty, the pressure, and the mindset it takes to rebuild when you know, when the rules change on you. If you've ever wondered how stable your practice really is, this one's gonna hit a little close to home. All right, let's get into it. All right, guys, what do you do if every lawyer's nightmare comes through, uh comes true, and the general legislature wipes away your entire practice area with the swipe of a tort reform pen? Well, that's exactly what happened to Alexander Liznersky down in Florida back in 2023 when the Florida legislature passed that sweeping tort reform bill that shocked all of us. Alexander was working at Morgan ⁇ Morgan at the time uh uh in the top quartile, top top five percent of their lawyers, uh, and had the entire practice area really uh changed uh kind of overnight, although they gave him a five-year runway, and we'll be talking about that today. Alexander, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Thank you so much for having me. I'm I'm uh very happy to be here.

SPEAKER_04 1:52

So I remember this bill in 2023, this Florida tort reform bill, and I remember him being shocked that it got passed in John Morgan's backyard. And it changed a couple of things. Uh it changed your statute of limitations, it changed the way damages are calculated, and then it moved Florida a little bit closer to the rest of the tort universe by taking away that weird pure comparative negligence rule that you have. But from a boots on the ground perspective, what really changed in Florida law?

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Yeah, so uh you know, I'll never forget I was actually on my way to work from a meeting and I had another attorney call me and he said, uh, you're not gonna believe this, but you know, Governor Ron DeSantis is talking right now, he's having a uh oppressor and he's talking about all the insurance laws and you know, and he was talking about the attorney's fees and the issues and whatever. And uh, you know, by the time I got back to the office and I looked it up, sure enough, I knew something was in the works. I didn't know at the time how big it would be. But yeah, I mean, it was massive. It's huge. It's a total advantage to the insurance companies here in Florida, and it changed a lot of things. So the statute of limitations went down to two years for negligence actions. The way damages are calculated and presented to the jury is different. And then important for me, what happened was the attorney's fees provision that protected insureds from their insurance companies, that was completely wiped out. Uh so there are other, you know, other things in there as well, but it was a massive change and it was very unfortunate. And I think we're starting to see the results of that here in Florida. So, yeah, I mean, we we we had to act fast. Uh, John Morgan told us all. He said, if you have cases that are not filed, get them filed because we don't know how this bill is going to affect them. I myself and my team, we filed over 2,000 lawsuits. Uh Morgan and Morgan in their entirety filed, I think, over 35,000 throughout the state. Within the span of how long? I mean, two weeks. It was like two weeks. Oh my God. We had an entire operations center up in New York City. Yeah. And uh they did a fantastic job. And it was all hands-on decked. I mean, we were we were there on the weekend working, getting them filed, and it was all in protecting our clients and making sure that they were protected because the greatest threat to us was, you know, say the statute of limitations run, and then there's nothing we can do. Because once that date runs, there's nothing you can do.

What Florida Tort Reform Changed

SPEAKER_04 4:09

How do you, I mean, just from a sheer operations perspective, 2,000 files, and I don't know how I don't know how big the team was, but how do you make sure with every one of these clients that we've drafted an accurate complaint? The client has like reviewed and signed off on the complaint, um, and then you must have fielded hundreds and hundreds of calls about is my case really worth one million or three million or whatever ad daminum you're putting? I don't know if Florida requires an ad daminum, but in Virginia we get that all the time. Well, you told me to settle my case for 100,000, but you pled like 1.5 on the ad daminum. How did you manage that sheer operational push?

SPEAKER_02 4:43

Yeah, I mean, you know, the great thing about being at Morgan is that they have such a good software called Litify that just puts in the information, everything is up to date. It it does a very, very good job of creating documents. And um, we were able to do it that way because we trusted Litify to have the accurate information, and it always does. Now, granted, sometimes there will be some mistakes. And I mean, you know, I'm not afraid to admit that there might have been a few mistakes, but thankfully the Florida courts allow us to amend freely, and the courts grant us um liberality into um amending our complaints, and so we had to do that, and every attorney had to do that, I'm sure. But it got done and things solidify it. We we did a very good job.

SPEAKER_04 5:28

How does the defense bar handle 2,000 from your team and 35,000, I think you said from either across the state or from Morgan and Morgan? Like that that flood of documents, how does the defense bar react to something like that? Because they're not typically as well equipped as we are with the technology to spit answers out.

The Two-Week Lawsuit Filing Sprint

SPEAKER_02 5:47

So, you know, it's funny you say that because the defense bar did pretty fine. And the reason why is because the insurance companies, they wised up and they paid on a lot of them. They would rather pay the claim and pay the money's money's out and settle the lawsuit. And they did that for a huge majority of the files. I mean, I think almost all of mine settled pretty quickly. But yeah, I mean, they they just paid out and settled, which they should have done in the first place. And, you know, I remember um a couple weeks after that, a month after that, I'd have a stack of checks, you know, stack of checks like that just sitting on my desk for all these claims where they either didn't pay or underpaid or or whatever. But you know, the attorneys, the defense bar that actually did get the cases later, I'm sure there were a lot of law firms that were overwhelmed with it for sure.

SPEAKER_04 6:32

The other one of the other things that changed is you moved the rule from uh I I forget the term, but either pure to modified uh comparative negligence or modified to pure, where basically you have to be less than 49% at fault for the happening of your injury to be able to recover anything. In Virginia, where I practice, you get 1%. If you are 1% at fault, you get nothing. And so that's it's a wild world that you practice for so long where somebody could be 80% at fault for their injuries and still recover the 20% that somebody else contributed to it.

SPEAKER_02 7:06

Right. So in Florida, it was, you know, say you're 60% at fault and the other side's 40%. So you're gonna recover 40%. But now um the law is that if you're over 50%, so 50.1%, 51%, whatever, you get nothing. You get zero. And that that's one of the new uh laws that came in with tort reform. And now that forces plaintiff's attorneys to really look at the case in depth and see whether or not, hey, you know, is there any liability on your end? Because if there is, we got to determine whether a jury would think that you're more than 50% liable. And honestly, there's a lot of cases like that. There really are. So you really, you know, plaintiff's attorneys have to be very careful when they're taken in these cases. And, you know, there's been enough time that's gone by now where I think they're they're on it and they understand that.

SPEAKER_04 7:55

I talk to people from outside Virginia and they're always shocked to hear about the contributory negligence rule. And my practice is almost exclusively car crashes. And in car crashes, I find that contributory negligence really is not a thing. Like there are so few fact patterns where the plaintiff was also doing something wrong. Maybe you both entered the intersection at the same time, but usually that's a dispute over what color is the light. It's really not, you know, the plaintiff was going 45 and a 25 and came into the intersection, then you otherwise would have missed him. But we don't have, by and large, slip and fall cases or premises liability cases up here because of that 1% barrier. Florida must be just a wash with slip and fall, trip and fall.

SPEAKER_02 8:40

Yeah, I mean, the the case law on premises cases here in Florida is pretty, pretty bad for cases like that. Um so before tort reform, they were already hard because of the case law. So you'd have a lot of cases that would go to MSJ or summary judgment motions, and the case would really be determined there because a lot of times uh the plaintiffs would lose there. So now with the new law, it makes it even harder. And honestly, I mean, you know, unless it's a very, very good slip and fall case, I just don't take them. I just don't take them.

SPEAKER_04 9:09

It is funny how different the jurisdictions are because in Virginia state court for negligence cases, there really is no such thing as a motion for summary judgment.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

Oh, really? I didn't even know that. It doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_04 9:19

What you know, in large part because you're not allowed to use a deposition in a motion for summary judgment. And so so you you really would have to get somebody to to admit to a bunch of facts on request for admissions in order to get there. Um, of course, in in federal court we have it, but Virginia State Court, there's really no summary judgment practice.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

Right, right. Well, let me let me say one thing too. So the one thing that's really interesting to me, um, that makes Florida very unique, right? Is the mandatory insurance that everybody has to have in Florida. It's$10,000 pip. It's terrible. It was enacted in like 1975. I believe it was at like$5,000 back then, then it went up to$10,000, but it's been$10,000, you know, up until now, which is insane. Overall in Florida, the insurance industry, just the insurance realm in itself when it comes to motor vehicle insurance, it's terrible. It's disastrous because I have a lot of people that call me and I'll sign them up, I'll help them out, but I'll I'll tell them like, look, the person that hit you who's at fault, they probably have no insurance. They probably have$10,000 PIP, which is not going to cover you. That covers them. So it's basically no insurance. And that's why I tell everybody you have to get uninsured motorists, which is known as to protect yourself, because 85% of the drivers out there, it might be even higher, they have minimum insurance, which is$10,000. And here in Florida, where we have, I think, close to 7 million people or more. I mean, it's just downright.

SPEAKER_04 10:51

It's yeah, right. It's$10,000 in PIP, but there's no requirement that you carry liability coverage, right? Right. That's it's it's nuts. We have a case now where our client, there's a counterclaim against him and he had a Florida policy. We're like, whatever, file the counterclaim and we'll get an insurance defense lawyer to defend it. Turns out he's got zero dollars in liability coverage.

SPEAKER_02 11:09

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:10

And Virginia has that, we have that savings statute where everybody else's state minimum policy comes up to ours, which is now fifty thousand dollars, by the way. Uh but if you don't have any liability coverage, you don't get you don't get that.

SPEAKER_02 11:22

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_04 11:22

So as as much as Virginia lawyers complain about contributory negligence, like there are parts of the country that really have it. How do you build an auto practice when most people don't have any liability coverage? And I assume if you don't have liability coverage, you also don't have underinsured coverage.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

Right, correct. And I mean, you know, that's why I tell everyone you have to get you have to protect yourself. And um I think the word is starting to get out there about that.

SPEAKER_04 11:46

But um but yeah, I think nobody listens until it's too late, right? Right. Because you're you're often you're telling them because they're sitting in your office with a case that you're telling them is worth zero dollars.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

Well, I mean, you know, I just I just signed a case where luckily it was uh husband and wife, and they're like in their mid-20s, and I asked them, I'm I said, I want to see your policy, and they had UM. They have UM. And I'm like, that's the smartest thing you did because we found out, sure enough, the FL driver had nothing. And it's just it's nuts for Florida to have this bare bones insurance. Um, you have so many people out there that have no insurance at all on their vehicle, and it just makes for a very um a very bad time for for us to live here and have to deal with that. I mean, compare that to Michigan, where you don't have as nearly as much uh people that live there, and their limits are 250,000 pip and then 250,000 BI on their policies that are that's mandatory. It's mandatory. You can actually elect ununlim you can elect uh elect unlimited pip uh there as well.

Comparative Negligence And Case Selection

SPEAKER_04 12:48

So Well, but Michigan's Michigan's got that kind of blended no-fault. I went to school in Michigan and they have a um Yeah, you have a 250 minimum, but you have to be over whatever permanent impairment threshold in order. So I, you know, most of our bread and butter cases are soft tissue cases, and you can't bring, as far as I as far as I understand, you can't bring those in Michigan. But let's the that third leg of the tort reform stool is is where I understand you were really building your practice, which is getting attorney's fees on these pip denied pip claims by insurance companies.

SPEAKER_02 13:19

Right, right. So what tort reform did was it repealed Florida statute. The reason why we had that statute in Florida in the first place was so that it could protect Floridians from insurance companies that would downright deny or underpay claims all the time. So what the statute does is if you as a Floridian sued your insurance company, so you're the insured, you're suing the insurance company, and you won your case, the insurance company had to pay your attorney's fees. And the reason why they did that was because this was back in the 1800s, so it was around for close to 200 years. And the reason why they did that, why Florida legislature implemented it, is because back then, I'm sure as right now, same thing right now, even more right now, I think, right? Even more, the insurance companies would deny or underpay claims all the time. And Floridians had to hire an attorney out of their own pocket to sue insurance companies, and the Floridian was never made whole, never, because the insurance company would have to pay the claim, what they had to pay, but the insured would have to take that money and give some to their attorney, so they were never made whole. And so they implemented that law which says, okay, well, let's have the insurance companies pay for the insured's attorney because that'll that would balance the field, that would balance the playing field. And uh, unfortunately, in 2023, that statute was repealed, so we do not have that anymore.

SPEAKER_04 15:45

And so now if you have a PIP medical claim and insurance company denies it, not only do you owe the doctor the money, but now you have to go out and hire a lawyer to uh maybe to prosecute that claim either an hourly or contingency rate, and then that reduces what the doctor's getting. But it's kind of fueling this strange relationship, at least from the insurance company would call it a strange relationship between plaintiff's lawyers and doctors, right? Like you bring this back and forth referral relationship where it could benefit the lawyer because the insurance company is going to deny the doctor's bill and then the lawyer's gonna get get the fee. And so I've got to imagine like that was at least part of the impetus behind the push to get rid of that, right?

SPEAKER_02 16:25

Yeah, I mean, so what they were saying was that there were a lot of frivolous lawsuits out there. And um, I remember the governor saying, you know, we had a case where 11 cents in interest was owed by the insurance company. The case went all the way up, you know, to I don't know, like a district court of appeal, the plaintiff's attorney, you know, they won. And when I say plaintiff's attorney, what I really mean is the insured, right? The insured won. And so they got the 11 cents, but the attorney got like 450,000 in attorney's fees.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

And look, I I get the optics of it.

Florida’s Broken Auto Insurance Reality

SPEAKER_02 16:56

Well, that's exactly right. I mean, I get the optics of it. I understand it, but why didn't the insurance company pay the 11 cents? Because under Florida's PIP statute, you send a demand letter first before you have before you file a suit. And you are required by law, it's subsection 10 of the statute, where you're required by law to send that demand letter. And the insurance company can do one of three things. They can pay it, they can deny it, or they can extend uh extend time time for like two months to 90, or I'm sorry, two months to three months to investigate the claim, but eventually they do have to either pay it or deny it. So with an 11 cent interest, wouldn't why wouldn't they just pay that? Which they didn't. And look, when they don't pay it, now they know or they should know, they should have known that, hey, this attorney is gonna fight this because look, at the end of the day, we're talking about cents on this one case. But when you take all the claims in Florida together on a specific issue, you're talking about millions and millions of dollars where insurance companies are trying to decide, okay, well, should we pay it? Should we not pay it? How do we make money? That's that's the end, that's the end result for them is how do we make more money?

SPEAKER_04 18:02

How many can we ignore before it before it actually hits our pocketbooks? Was it a is it a bad faith standard, or it's just a straight if the plaintiff wins, they also get to tackle on attorney's fees.

SPEAKER_02 18:11

Yeah, I mean, there's so many issues in the pip realm that have they they they just kind of like come out of nowhere um and they get super complicated. I mean, like, you know, I've been doing it for so long, and when I first started doing pip, I had no idea what what type of cases these are. And as I started reading the case law and starting to understand like how insurance companies can underpay and whatever, it's very, very complicated. But let me tell you right now, what I'm seeing is say that you're in a motor vehicle accident, right? And you go treat with a chiropractor. So your PIP should pay that chiropractor. So the insurance company's policy has PIP. They should pay the chiropractor, right? For the services he renders to you. What they're doing now is they're hiring other chiropractors on their behalf who will look at the records and say, you know what, this person, they're fully treated. They're fine. Any other further care is gonna be unreasonable, unnecessary, or not related to the accident. And so what they do is they deny, they just deny any further coverage of your PIP, or they can even go back in time and say, hey, these bills, we should have never paid them, or we're not gonna pay them. So I'm seeing a lot of that happening in addition to independent medical examinations where the insurance company will hire, you know, a doctor, you know, chiropractor, orthopedic, whatever, and examine these people and say, look, you guys are fine. You're you're absolutely fine. There's no issues, there's no reason why the insurance company should pay for your medical bills anymore. So I'm seeing a lot of that. As a matter of fact, 100% of my files right now, that's that's what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_04 19:42

Is that relatively new after the tort reform bill?

SPEAKER_02 19:45

Yes. Yep. So I've been seeing an increase of it for the past couple of years. Mostly last year they really started ramping up. There's uh certain few bad actors that are really bad. I'm not gonna name them, but you know, I'm I'm seeing it from I'm seeing it from everybody. More, some do it more than others, but but look, at the end of the day, the the uh the doctors, the chiropractors who are treating people, they do have recourse because there is a subsection uh to tort reform. It was basically the issue came up that Representative Michael Beltran mentioned, who's a really good friend of mine. Um, I've known him for a long time. He said, Well, what happens if an insurance company completely denies a claim? Okay, like like zero. Like they shouldn't be able to do that because that's going to really make it hard on the insured, and uh the insured's getting nothing. So what he did was he created another law that was enacted around the same time tort reform was, and it's under chapter 86 uh of the Florida statutes, which is for declaratory actions. And what it says is under 86.121, it says if you hire an attorney as an insured and you have suffered a total coverage denial of a claim and you win that declaratory action, then you have your you can have your attorney's fees uh reimbursed by the insurance company. But it has to be a total coverage denial of a claim. So for example, if you have a house claim, right, hurricane claim, and they pay zero, then then you can use that statute in your advantage. But now, you know, um a lot of these insurance companies, they they get that. So what do they do? And I'm sure you can guess what they do. What do they do? It's a hundred fifty dollar offer. Correct. Yes. So that's what they're doing is they'll make, you know, a very low ball offer, they'll send you the check and say, hey, it's not a total coverage now of a claim. So we're seeing a lot of that. But in the in the PIP realm, what I do, a claim is a HICFA 1500 form that is sent by a medical provider to the insurance company. Each form is an individual claim. Correct, correct. And we had we now have me and attorney Tim Patrick, who's another PIP attorney in Tampa, I work very closely with him. We have like eight or nine orders now in our favor on that issue. It's an issue of first impression. And I got the first order out of Hillsborough County on it, which I was very happy about. But yeah, that's exactly correct. So if you submit a HIPFA 1500 form and the insurance company doesn't pay it because of, you know, IME or the peer review denial, or they're saying there's fraud, but I had one with a fraud allegation, they didn't pay it. And then, of course, when I follow suit, what do they do? They paid it. So, you know, it's just stuff like that. So that's good for me in the PIP realm. And I'm getting a lot of clients signing up with me that um, you know, that allow me to pursue that stuff.

SPEAKER_04 22:32

And the smart thing that you did while you were at Morgan Morgan and developing this PIP practice is you established relationships with doctors, right? You didn't just sit back in the office and allow John Morgan and all the advertising that they do to feed you. You went out and you established personal relationships with these doctors so that now that you've left, you have uh the referral relationships and you've been able to build a practice on your own. So You left of the mothership, what would you say, August of 2025? Yeah, it was like around June, July of last year. And set up your own your own shop. Yep. And uh just you and an assistant. And um and and you told me before we started recording, like without any real designs on scale.

Fee Repeal And The New Denial Playbook

SPEAKER_02 23:09

Yeah, I mean, look, I know it takes time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but at the same time, I'm very happy with where I am because I'm getting a lot of good cases in and I'm getting a lot. And I'm getting a lot of pip files in, which is good. Obviously, I will need more help down the line, but I look at Adam Lowy, who's also very, uh, very um popular on LinkedIn. He keeps it very minimal with his costs. It's him and assistant, and he does a very, very good job. And I love that model. And I I'm kind of replicating that here as well. And I enjoy it, man. I really do enjoy it. I I don't know if I'm gonna keep it this way. I don't know, probably not, because I love growing things. You know, when I was at Morgan, I took that division, I took that pip division. They were making really not that much money before me. But when I got there, I had the experience and the knowledge of how to be a very good pip attorney and how to transform a team into a very successful team. And that's how I was able to take very low earnings and just completely scale it way high up. Like you said, top five percent earning attorneys at the firm. So I don't think it's gonna be, I don't think it's gonna be me, just me and my assistant for much longer.

SPEAKER_04 24:17

Yeah, I don't know. There's there's pros and cons, right? I mean, the on the one hand, the low overhead means you're probably making more money in the short term than you would be if you had higher overhead. On the other hand, when you go on vacation, you're not making any money or you're not actually taking a vacation. Right. And so there's there's pros and cons with that, and having having gone through cycles where we really wanted to grow, and having gone through cycles where we're just like you, we're like, you know what, this is pretty good right now. That feeling is going to change over the course of your career. The important thing to do is to not look around at everybody else and go, you know, everybody is talking about growth and scale, and you should do that just because everybody else is talking about it. I do find like that buzzword, that growth scale buzzword, seems to be less popular in the last 12 or 24 months. Now it's like just get your AI agents to do everything, which I don't think is the right answer either. Are you implementing AI in the in the PIP practice?

SPEAKER_02 25:07

So I I am not. Um, I'm not I'm not using AI. I mean, I will look, I do use AI, right? But it's not going to be for something that's case related, uh specifically like working on an actual case. The reason why is because the case law on AI and using AI in your files, there really, there really isn't much case law on it, and specifically as to attorney client privilege. I know there is one order out of New York, right? Um I'm sure you're familiar with it, which basically says, look, if you're uploading client files into AI, you're breaking attorney client privilege. Now, I don't, I don't think that is, you know, respectfully, I don't think that's correct. Um the reason why is because the way I look at it is, you know, we use Microsoft to send emails, right? You're gonna have files attached to it and you're sending it to other attorneys in your firm and it's all sensitive information, but at the end of the day, Microsoft has that information too, right? So I think that's the correct analysis with AI. We're gonna be using AI in conjunction with sending emails or using um, you know, using ATT to discuss important matters. Like they have that stuff too. So technically, with that reasoning, you're breaking attorney client privilege by sending emails and also talking on the phone about your files.

SPEAKER_04 26:22

Yeah. Just like by by sticking the letter in the mail. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we we are use it within a closed circuit environment within our case management software. And and I think that same analysis that you just went through with Microsoft would apply there. The thing that I'm finding more and more often is that clients are are taking my email and feeding it into AI and then sending me the response sometimes without like looking at it. I'm like, you know, you know how you could just kind of tell, like, you don't talk like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you get like three paragraphs back and there's numbered and bulleted. Um, my intake coordinator came to me earlier this week and said, you know, I I just get the feeling like these people that I'm talking to on the phone are in real time typing things into chat or Claude and asking the next question. Because she's like, I can hear some typing. Then there's kind of a pause, and then there's like the next thing coming. And so we're we are grappling with how do we deal with the client's client's access to information, which most of it is correct, but the stuff that is not correct can be a really problematic for the case or can be really time consuming for the lawyer to explain why the AI machine is not correct about that thing about Virginia law. Are you seeing any of that from your client?

Going Solo With Low Overhead

SPEAKER_02 27:34

Oh my god, every day, man, every single day. I mean, I get emails all the time and clearly from Chat GPT or some kind of AI source. And you know what I do? I just straight up decline them. I say, I'm sorry, look, I don't, I don't want because obviously if it's a good case, I'm gonna take the time to explain it and sign the client up, right? But the majority of these are not, they're not that. And so these people think they have an amazing case and they cite all these different laws, and it's not that's just not how it works. And I tell people, you know, like, look, it's like you're trying to perform brain surgery and you're not a brain surgeon, you know, you're gonna mess up. And I had one lady, for example, she emailed me, and um, you know, I do some consumer stuff on the side too, and she said, Hey, I need a consumer attorney. You know, I have a case that I filed, which is already the first red flag, right? That's the first flag. And uh I said, okay, well, let me take a look at it because it sounds like it might be a good consumer case. And sure enough, I pulled up the docket, and there's already a final judgment from a month ago or you know, a month and a half ago, against her in favor of the corporation. I forgot who it was, but not only did she lose the case, she now has to pay the other side's attorney's fees and costs. And that was fifty thousand dollars in itself, you know. So she took this case with Chad GPT and ran it all the way up, all the way up, and she lost really bad. I remember, I remember what it was. She forgot to attach affidavits to her summary judgment motion. And the judge denied her motion and granted the other side's motion, and so case is done. But it's, you know, the regular person has no idea that's right. Yeah, that's what happens.

AI, Privilege Fears, And Client Confusion

SPEAKER_04 29:11

That's right. I mean, it's it's you know, we use this analogy or when when we were in law school, you're being taught to think like a lawyer, right? And and thinking like a lawyer often doesn't mean knowing all the answers, it means knowing which questions to ask. And I think AI is gonna be the same thing. As, you know, it can have all the answers, but if you don't ask it the right question, like from a Florida procedural perspective, what do I need to do to make sure I don't get kicked out of court? You're not gonna get that answer. Right. And so yeah, you you know, there you and I will have all of these cautionary tales, and but I think the general public, just like the underinsured motorist stuff, it's like not me, or or it's it won't happen to me, or it's not my problem until it's too late. So we'll see. It it is a uh an interesting time to be practicing in a public-facing practice area.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

Yeah, I mean, really what what they should do is it all starts in public schools and schools. I mean, there has to be a course, even just a basic finance course. You know, just I know in like in high school, like I know they're starting to implement like finance courses, but it should just be like, you know, how to protect your family, how to protect yourself, just you know, maybe a one-day lesson on what's uninsured motorist coverage, like what different policies are out there to help you? What's life insurance? You know, I was never taught what life insurance was in in high school or anything. So it's just stuff like that, man.

SPEAKER_04 30:27

It all starts from from the schools. High school or college. I thought you were gonna say prompting should be a course. And I was like, that's a great idea. I'm gonna start teaching my kids about AI prompting. All right, man. Well, listen, this has been uh a lot of fun, and I'm glad you're finding the success that you are down in Florida. If people want to connect with you, if for some reason I have a medical doctor in Florida who's listening to this show who's got a pip collections issue, how can they find you?

How To Reach Alexander

SPEAKER_02 30:51

Yeah, man. So uh laserskylaw.com. I also am on social media, so uh Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. I don't know why. I uh I'm I'm pretty big on LinkedIn. I just started posting, and sure enough, I think the reason why is because I post about stuff that's relevant, that matters to people, just like you do. And uh and you know, that's that's why uh I'm seeing a lot of success there. But yeah, they can reach out to me, go to my website, my numbers on there, and uh I'd be more than happy to help anybody who needs help. And I always tell everyone look, if you if I can't help you in this area in the Tampa Bay area, I most likely know an attorney who can. And they're not gonna be a bad attorney, they're gonna be a good attorney. I only know the good ones. So yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:32

We know we know the bad ones also. We just Yeah, we know the bad ones.

SPEAKER_02 31:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:37

We just don't give out their names. Right. All right, I'll make sure I link to all that in the show description. Thanks for coming on out. All right, man. Appreciate it. Take care.