The Sterling Family Law Show
The Sterling Family Law Show is where successful family law attorneys share the exact systems they used to build million-dollar practices.
Host Jeff Hughes scaled Sterling Lawyers from zero to $17M with 27 attorneys.
Co-host Tyler Dolph runs Rocket Clicks, the agency in charge of supercharging Sterling and other family law practices to success using revenue-first marketing strategies.
Together, they share the playbook for building the law firm of your dreams.
If you're looking to grow exponentially, generate revenue, and get good at business, this podcast is for you.
The Sterling Family Law Show
What 3 Lawyers Learned Using AI for Law Firms Daily - #166
AI for law firms isn't theory anymore. Three family law firm owners share what's working right now—and what isn't.
Here's the brutal truth: firms using AI for law firms will replace those who don't. This panel reveals legal practice automation that's happening today—ChatGPT chatbots for AI standard operating procedures, attorney productivity AI that eliminates "I forgot" client moments, and law firm systems automation that turns legal research around in minutes.
The technology adoption gap is creating law firm competitive advantage right now, not in five years.
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📄 CHAPTERS
0:00 - AI For Law Firms: The Fork in the Road Family Lawyers Face
1:52 - Jeff Hughes on AI Implementation Law Firms Can Start Today
3:20 - Charlotte's AI Chatbot Law Firms System That Replaces Dead SOPs
8:27 - From Efficiency to Service: How AI Legal Research Changes Everything 9:55 - Jeff Morrell's Deep Research System That Fact-Checks Itself
14:17 - Charlotte on Why Lawyers Who Use AI Will Replace Those Who Don't
17:16 - Family Law Technology Reality: Clients Already Use ChatGPT Weekly
20:44 - Jeff Hughes's Four-Pronged Attack for Legal Technology Adoption
25:38 - Final Advice: How to Leverage Attorney Productivity AI This Week
28:46 - The Jagged Frontier: What AI Does Brilliantly vs. What It Can't Do
31:10 - Client Service Automation Without Losing the Human Touch
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clients are paying for results. At the end of the day. And family are going through a difficult time. One of the most difficult times in your life. You want to get through this period. You want to have the right things happen as it relates to the documents and the procedures and everything else. I don't think anyone's concerned with how you got there. Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show, the podcast designed to help family attorneys build the firm of their dreams. I am your host, Tyler Dolph. I'm also the CEO of our law firm consultancy called Rocket Clicks that was born out of our very own family law firm called Sterling Lawyers that has grown to over 27 attorneys. Today we are going to discuss the state of AI in family law firms, and we've brought some friends along to help us with the conversation. If you're listening, we have the co-founder of Sterling Law as well as our co-host on this show, Jeff Hughes, with Hi everybody. Morning. then we have a friend of the show, as well as a client of Rocket Clicks and the leader of Summit Family Law. Charlotte is with us from Alabama today. Great to have all of you with us. Really appreciate your time. Excited for this conversation. I am hoping to go a little round robin style and talk, and hear about how we are leveraging AI in your firm today and kind of what you think the landscape looks like, or how it's changed since the introduction of these large language models. Jeff Hughes, I will start with you. Oh, stop being put me last so I can listen to the smart people talk. But, so the question is like where? What's the question? have you experienced as it relates to to leveraging AI in the firm? And where do you think it's going to go? Well, I see I as a tremendous I mean, to me, I'm super bullish on I feel like it's a big opportunity for us as a firm. I see so many different areas that we can improve our service to our clients utilizing AI tools, both from a client communication standpoint. And also just reducing the lawyer's workload on delivering the service to our clients. So overall super bullish on it. I, you know, there's a few cautions, obviously, that go along with that, that I see for us. But we are excited internally at our firm is where things are going. Jeff Morrell, one of our, partners is with us, and him and I have been working on mainly him. I will say I've been working on an AI product that will enhance our communication and also allow us to open up markets that we can't currently get into because we're just, just from a cost standpoint, because about 60, 60 to 65% of the litigants in Wisconsin do not have a lawyer. And we feel like we are creating something that will enable a large percentage of those to get access to legal representation using our our new tools that we're building. So we're excited about it. a Charlotte. How about you guys over in Alabama? You know, I think the the thing that we are utilizing most now is we put all of our, SOPs, our systems, our processes and procedures into our own AI chat bot so that now, instead of the team having to go look up a procedure, they can just go straight to the chat bot and say, how do I do X? And it will tell them based on what we've put in. So it cuts down the time and makes it so much easier to to, you know, get a checklist. So it'll give them a checklist of, you know, if you're did an IQ test, a divorce, these are the things you have to make sure that you do. Yeah. It's, it seems to be helping a lot. And, you know, just the realization, I guess, that we need to accept AI and not battle it, has been the the best use for us, but we've got a few things up our sleeve and and the pipeline that we're putting out there. We're excited about. That's great. Charlie, one of my biggest frustrations lifetime with standard operating procedures is that you have to update them. And usually when you write them that they sit on a shelf and never get touched again. So I love that you're able to take those, and it lives and breathes and grows within your firm without you having to go back and constantly think about updating every one of those things. And JF the thing is, is that, you know, our process now says that if you update any how are you add any new process. You just go in and tell the AI, yeah, this is going to replace or this is an addition to our our standard operating procedure, you know, whatever the number is or whatever. And then you don't have to go take it out, read date it all that. So it's in there and they knows it quickly because you just attach the, you know, the written document there and so that makes it, it just makes it so much easier. And and probably effective too, because, I mean, anyone who has worked in a company knows that nine out of ten times or nine out of ten people are going to go are not going to go look at the SOPs. They're going to ask somebody who knows the SOP to get the answer, because they don't want to go pick it up themselves. So you're essentially creating that like infinite knowledge coworker who can answer those questions. So you're connecting your employees with the SOPs that would otherwise be subject to human error and time suck to those other employees where, you know, work. And you have the thing is, is that we as leaders, we've really pushed the leadership team. And when somebody ask a question or if something you know is done that we know didn't follow the process, or if there's a problem or a question, we're having the leaders pull it up. We're saying, okay, let's go. Let's go to our our brain. That's what we call it. And then you go to our brain. We ask in that first off, and, you know, nine times out of ten they didn't make us. They did it from memory. Right. So our leaders are going right in front of them, pulling up and saying, here's what you missed. Here's why you missed it. Here's what you would have gotten if you had gone. And I think that that's, you know, it's it's slow iteration, right? Because change is so uncomfortable for people. But, you know, I think just doing it just the repetition of doing that and, and making sure that you lean into it just like everything else, just like with a written recipe, you can't just put it in place and say, here it is, use it. You've got to. I think as leaders really exhibit it. And I think that, you know, we're working hard to do that. Is there a specific tool that you're using Charlotte. We, well, we have two different tools. We have a tool for marketing that we're using that we got from Alex or Moses. We actually purchased. So Alex from OZY had a deal where he essentially every person he had coached and every business that he had, purchased, he had put with, of course, with their permission, he had put all of it into an AI. And so for marketing purposes, you know, we can go in there and get a lot of information out. So we purchased that, from him. And we use that a lot to help us just know next next steps and next pieces to, to use based on the experience, of course, of course, of, you know, successful businesses because as we know, you know, success leaves clues. So why not use that? But then we just we we made our own chat bot from ChatGPT Jeff. And that's what we're using for our SOPs. There's a lot of, guides out there on how to put your SOPs into a chat bot. Essentially, it's just it's just teaching it and giving it your information, telling it what you want it, what you want it to do, and how you want it to give an answer. And, you know, we've been we've been pretty pleased with it is is time consuming getting all that in there. But it's not nearly as time consuming as trying to teach people where all the SOPs are in a book or even in a Google job. Hundred percent. It's great. I think what we're talking about right now is the efficiency gained through leveraging a tool like I. Right. And there's a there's a million iterations that can come out of how do you leverage this tool and what does it look like. And individual firms are going to have to figure that out on their own. But it feels like this is the first kind of big movement of how people are leveraging AI and how firms are using it is to create these efficiencies. Morrell I'm going to make the assumption that you're closest to AI, given everything I've heard about you and how you're leveraging it in the firm. How do you feel like firms are going to evolve from simply using it to find efficiencies, to actually leveraging it for, for different purposes? Yeah, I that's a fantastic question because there are those dual lanes of AI implementation. You can be looking at efficiency or you can be looking at service offering improvement or expansion. Right. So there's things that we can do now that we couldn't do before. And I probably have seen that in my personal practice more than, more than anyone. That's probably been the biggest change that I've made. The level of service that I'm able to provide to my clients is has expanded dramatically. In terms of quicker responses, better responses, more thorough, advice and counsel, better record keeping the amount of times that I've got to go back to my client saying, what did what did you tell me? Or I don't remember what we talked about at our last meeting. The number of times that I have to do that now is roughly zero. And it was not uncommon before, and probably a very frustrating experience for the customer. And, so expanding on the service offering that, that you can deliver to people, the efficiency in some time in some cases goes hand in hand with that. Right? So if I need to do legal research, I can now offload that to, to an AI. And I can turn that around quicker. It's more efficient. It's also better. That's great. When you talk about offloading it, I think some things that we've heard in the past or a complaint is, well, is it accurate Yeah. area is how have you dealt with that? Yeah. There's there's, hallucinations are always a problem. They I think every lab has basically said they're going to be a problem given the current technology. And better LMS, bigger LMS aren't going to solve that problem. That's going to persist. There are a number of tools you can use. And I when I have talked to other attorneys at our firm and showed them how you can use this, that's always the first question. How can I trust this? And, there's different things that I do because I always double check I'm not satisfied with just getting an answer. One is using, deep research. And whether you're using quad ChatGPT anthropic, deep seek all of them. Have a deep and grok. All of them have deep research functionality where they're coming over lots of data for maybe ten, 20 minutes. And they're visiting maybe 200 websites. You can a steer where those you know, what that source material is. So when I'm asking it to do legal research, I say specifically stay out of law firm websites. It's not a reliable resource. Even I found, you know, we found plenty of errors, even in our and Sterling's website that we aggressively go after to try to fix, to make sure that everything's accurate. But so I'll say like, stick to statutes, Wisconsin law, journal articles, things like that, reputable sources. And then when you get the results, they're generally very high quality, generally very accurate. But I will take those results and then I might run deep research a second time. I'll take the results and I'll say your job as under deep research is stuff that go fact check this stuff like go actually read all of the cases that are cited here and make sure that the propositions that this research represents, if it says that this case says this thing, make sure it it it actually says this thing. And so now you've got you're just leveraging that tool again, to ensure that everything's accurate. And it's, it's a rare day when it comes back and says that it found an issue. Or when I spot one. Yeah it's great. And again back to the the play that by by having that done for you you are then able to focus on being a great attorney, being great at client service, helping your clients understand what's happening and where it going. Which I think is is a huge advantage of leveraging not only delegation techniques with your team, but also Lawrence. Like with language models. And I. Yeah. And it. Right. It's not anything that I have looked at. One says, oh this is going to replace me because it, it does quite a bit of the work and it does a better job researching than I do, than I could do. But then applying that case law or that research to my client's factual situation and my, you know, local experience with the judges and how they interpret these laws or how they deal with these circumstances. Right. I bring the human judgment to that. I has very little style, in a visual sense and in, in applying the applying legal standards to fact patterns, it's actually not all that good at that. It's not, but not necessarily bad. It's better than maybe like a first year law student. But, that human element, the human judgment still needed. And, Like, the focus that I can bring to a case, I can spend more of that mental energy on that, applying that judgment and communicating effectively with the client instead of researching, for example. Yeah, 100%. Charlotte, could you talk to that point a little bit? I know you and I have spoken about this in the past, the narrative that, well, it's just going to replace all of us and we should be terrified. Talk about how that's not the case. Maybe elaborating on, Jeff Morrell's statement that it allows him to be a better attorney at the end of the day. You know, Tyler, I think at the end of the day that people hire us for a result, right? They don't hire us to do drafting. They don't hire us to you keep up with calendars. They hire us for result, right? So we're able to give them a better result if we can spend more time on strategy and design. And so when a case comes in and we're working with somebody, if we can really spend our time on the strategy and really designing how we're going to represent them, how we're going to put their case, put their story in front of the trial of fact. That's something that I don't think I will ever do. You know, I don't think it will. I don't think our jobs are going away. I think many people's jobs will go away. Hear me on that. I think many people will because lawyers, you know, we don't like change the preacher Sunday preach don't change and talking about how people really hate change. And I was thinking about that with, you know, getting ready to talk to you all. And I thought lawyers not liking change and not being willing to change is going to be the the end to many people. And the profession. So, you know, you can't look at it as it's not going to come for us. Right? So I is going to replace not, you know, a lot of things in the medical space. It's going to replace things. And every space and legal space certainly isn't protected. But what I say is that it's such an advantage. You're living in such an amazing time that the service level that we can give the clients and the product that we can give to clients can be so much better when we utilize these GPT e's correctly. These things correctly, you know, today is not it's not something that's happened in five years, ten years from now. It's happening today. I mean, weekly, we're getting calls from people who are saying, you know, I don't want you to do anything but review what I've already put in the chat GPT and gotten out. Can you look over this? You know, they're they're not coming to us for drafting. They're coming to us for the result, but they're coming for validation. So is is not just the beginning. I think that lawyers who use AI will replace those who don't. And then I think, yeah, you know, may replace some roles and some jobs within the legal space. But I think that the firms that are still running like 1997 manual processes, you know, physical signatures, billable hours for document review, that sort of thing. I think those firms are already dying. And I think that what we're going to see is a faster, there's a faster movement toward those firms not existing anymore, because I think that's happened in real time. And that's why, you know, I'm I'm obsessed with what can we do to automate something, not take a job away from somebody and not not use it as like a template, because, you know, everything we do is specific to a client, but what we can automate and put into play, I think clients are going to demand it. They're going to see it in their own space. They're going to go to a doctor's office, or they're going to come to our office and they're going to say, why do I have to sit down with a piece of paper and pen and fill out 15 forms and on every platform put my name, my telephone number and address, you know, that's crazy. So we're working on an AI right now that allows our onboarding team to ask the questions that would otherwise be on that sheet that they filled out, and have those automatically flow to our, to our program, to our CRM, so that the team has that. So it makes it a better experience for our clients because we want to, you know, elevate that experience because that's what's so important. But elevation in the in our jobs, instead of eliminating our jobs, I think is the way that we have to look at it. So I think that it's important for us as lawyers to really shape this and to really, you know, determine how we can help other people grow and how we can help other people realize how serious this is, that that people buy into it and that they realize it's here, you know? And if they don't, I think, I think the legal industry is really just kind of, at a space that a lot of people don't even realize. I think we're at a place that there's a fork in the road, and you've got to make a decision. Are you going to go on the side that is sort of dwindling on the band or and go on the side that's here and that's real, and those things are real. Are you going to go on that side and, and build up your firm and give your clients the best opportunity by utilizing what's here and putting it into your workflow? Cuz I would love your, remarks there. Same question. With respect to. So I was thinking as Charlotte was talking especially with Charlotte, you touched on the leadership aspect of thing and our responsibility as leaders for our team to prepare our firm for the future, for security, for our teammates. I think so many of the lawyers that I talked to that I bump into when it comes to AI are mostly intimidated by it, and they know it's going to be important. They I think we're past that. There's the belief that it's going to be important. Our firm is going to impact our firm. It's kind of this, you know, it's going to change a lot within our practice. But what they get stymied on, what do we do? Like what's what's the next step to take because some of the stuff goes over their head, like whenever Charlotte, you're talking about the GPT and all that. I mean, I kind of know if they are because I've been paying attention, but for the most part, it goes over my head because I've never actually done it. So what I have done is I've tried to approach it from a four pronged attack personally. One is I've done my best over the past six months to train myself to go to AI first for solving my problems. What that looks like for me is I don't go to Google, so I change like the default browser on my computer, on my phone to one of the AI tools. So I do that. I keep top of mind on the skills that I need to keep enhancing that are not AI, skills that I can take, like like networking, leadership, communication ability and that sort of stuff. I also do my best to build up the knowledge of AI, build up my my understanding of how it's impacting our our greater business community, but also within, within law. So that I listen to a podcast every day. It's the AI Daily Brief podcast, the moral turn me on to it's like a ten minute podcast that just daily pumps AI information in my head. Not not all of it sticks. Most of it doesn't stick, but it it it enables me to have the conversation with others about it, how it's impacting us. So that's that's what I do with it. And then and then lastly, I go deep, I'm trying to focus my, my reading time on going deep on principles that have stood the test of time, that have, that you can go read a thousand year old books. And those principles are still true today, because those will stick with us no matter what happens. So if you go back and look at like whenever the, whenever we had like the, the mechanization of business that happened like in the early 1900s and so forth, that changed a ton of jobs and moved everybody into the cities, off the farms and all of that, the industrial revolution. But there were principles that were true before that and true after that. Those are the same principles are going to be true after AI does its thing over the next ten years. So those are the things that I try to read up on and stay stay focused on. You have think bar associations are are showing that fear, right. Because so many I've seen so many rules come down and you can't use AI and you can't do this, but you know that. The thing is, is that we've been using AI since our iPhone came out. I mean, essentially that's what Siri is. You know, what's how's I any different? Because at the end of the day, when I file something in the court system, it has my name on and I'm responsible for it. So however, I was able to procure that, be it from Westlaw, may I, from, you know, AI or may it from something I've built. I feel like we, as attorneys should have the freedom to do that if we're going to be responsible for, like for what we file, what we put in. But, you know, I think bars and their attorneys are so scared of it. They're just like, just don't use it. Don't use it. You know? And I think that that's going to slow us down. It's going to hurt the profession. Well, are you seeing that, in Wisconsin as well? Through the bar? Yeah. I would say that the general the public tone is very cautious, very skeptical. I don't think that's what's happening behind closed doors. I think people are maybe afraid to say it, that they're using it or, afraid to admit it. And a lot of that comes from the fear and the uncertainty of, like, not knowing how it works. And, I can't tell you how many people at our own firm are just have this constant fear that they're going to put a client name into the eye, and then that's going to pop out in some later conversation with someone else and divulge client secret, you know, client information. And, it's a lack of understanding. It's a, it's and it's an understandable fear. So I think that drives people to. Keep their eye use under the radar. And so what you see as a result, then, are the people who are generally calling for more restrictions. And I think the regulatory framework for that kind of thing moved much slower than the technology. So I, I don't pay a lot of attention to it. I don't think it's going to have a big impact on things moving forward. But I could be wrong about that. Interesting. I think Charlotte hit the nail on the head with the fact that clients are paying for results. At the end of the day. You're going through a very. And family are going through a difficult time. One of the most difficult times in your life. You want to get through this period. You want to have the right things happen as it relates to the documents and the procedures and everything else. I don't think anyone's concerned with how you got there. So as we are, trying to bring all this together, I think Jeff started with, this with his four pieces of advice or recommendations or things he's doing to stay on top of AI. Charlotte and Jeff Morrell, I would love your kind of thoughts or advice to our listeners on how they can either stay up to speed or how they can leverage AI in their firm. Charlotte, you want to go ahead? Sure. I'll go. So I think that. My advice would be to make sure that you understand it. So don't just go use it without understanding it and without understanding its limitations, okay? It's not a magic pill. It's not perfection. It has a lot of shortcomings. And you can't just go ask asking a question without setting up a foundation for your question and explaining to the GPT what you want it to give you back. So you have to understand that. And I think that you have to look at everything you do and say, how can we automate this? Just a little things just start with little things. How can we automate this with AI, the free ourselves to do something else. And I think that that's just, you know, not looking to eliminate what we do now, but really elevating it. So I think if you look to yourself, you look to the things that you do on a daily basis, I think you get to become obsessed with educating yourself, like Jeff said. And I think that you have to embrace it. You can't be scared of it. What? Your fear, what we don't know. Right? So when we don't know something, we tell ourselves stories. And so we fear it because we don't know it. And am I? You're so fast that I don't know that any of us will ever be in front of it? I think the place that we have to be is striving to to go as close to alongside it as we can. So I think that you've got to determine right now, today which one of those paths you're going to take. And if you're not using AI and you don't want to do it, you don't want to learn it, then surround yourself with people who will, who who can understand your vision, your mission, your values, and what you want for your business. Who can help you implement it, how you can go, I guess essentially be your AI to ask questions to. It's great. Well, how about you? I think, yeah. Getting past the fear is a big thing. Getting educated. You don't need to become a programmer, but understanding the fundamentals, like, there are tons of free courses on YouTube or Coursera or deep learning. I, that you can use to, to educate yourself so that you have that fundamental core knowledge of how this stuff works and that sets you up for success on all the other stuff. And that's a in particular, if you're going to move past like the chat bot type interface where you're using ChatGPT and on the web or on your phone or your computer, and actually implementing systems behind the scenes. Because one of the things that across eight different industries, a major shift has been build versus by, the build versus buy ratios have have flipped the number of enterprises building their own internal products has skyrocketed, while the number of SaaS products being sold is going down, because it has become so simple to do that. And without that core knowledge, you're not going to be able to break out of that. The other component of that learning journey is, getting good at using AI tools. It requires a lot of frustration and trial and error. You're not error with it. You know, in the next seven days where all of a sudden this makes sense and you know how to use it and you use it. Well, it it's a it's an imperfect tool. And, Ethan model, like, Professor Ethan Malik calls it the jagged frontier. It's there are some things that I does that are is absolutely incredible that I could never do. Right. Like the data analytics, I, I couldn't come close to understanding what all of these terms, you know, math terms are for, statistical analysis or whatever. But, it also can't tell me how many hours are in the word strawberry reliably. So there's some things that it's very good at, that very few humans are good at. And there's some things that it's really bad at that children can do. And learning that, learning that frontier, the edges of it and how to assemble context is absolutely critical. If you're running a law firm, you know, most of the law firms in the country are small. They're right. You're you're an entrepreneur. And I think what I will fundamentally change is it's going to turn all employees into entrepreneurs. And, your, you know, your set of tools, At varying levels of sophistication are going to be what you bring to the table in addition to your individual effort on a day to day basis. And, so I don't think anyone is, very few fields are as, well situated as the legal field, especially in, business to consumer, field, like, like family law, to make use of AI to great end. And I don't mean putting a chat bot on your website or having an AI to your emails. Those things can be helpful. But I think they're they're table stakes at this point. But like in my own implementations, I minimize as much as I can any visibility between my customer and and the AI, because that's not what they came to me for. They can get that on their own, right? Like the human touch point is really important. And I don't want them to ever feel like I just offloaded their, their needs, onto something else that they could have done on their own. So I really try to keep my focus on things that improve my work product, improve my accessibility or availability or reliability to my clients, to make me a better overall attorney, not to try to replace parts of my job. I think that's really gives us an opportunity to to come back to humanity. I think, Jeff, you hit it well there when you said, you know, it gives you an opportunity to talk to your clients as humans. I think sometimes I've had a tendency to get away from that. And as a result, you know, we don't have unreasonable hospitality. We don't have humanity in a lot of places, in a lot of situations. And I think that AI gives us a beautiful opportunity now to come back to the basics, to come back to to the way it used to be, that we wouldn't always have. So I think if you really look at it that way and embrace it in that regard, I think that it's got the potential to really change your practice. One of those core principles I was talking about earlier is the principle of humans crave human connection. And that's been true since the creation of man. And it is never more true today than it was, you know, 200 years ago. So I think anything we can do to provide an extra measure of that human connection to our clients, we're getting ahead in the process of doing that. So that's just one of the another one of those fundamental principles that will that are we'll be sure forever. It's a great point. As as technology advances come back and realizing that customer service is still the greatest differentiator, right? Your ability to connect with your customers and help them I'm. is paramount. This was super fun. Really appreciate, your time, your insights. I think we could spend, you know, 50 episodes talking through this. And maybe we should think about building a series on AI. But, I want to let you get back to running your firms. Really appreciate your time. Looking forward to the next one.
