Why Most Law Firms FAIL at AI Adoption ft. Eric Sanchez | Trial Lawyer View Ep. 88

What happens when AI stops being a future trend and becomes a competitive requirement for personal injury law firms? 

In this episode of Trial Lawyer View, Jason Lazarus speaks with Eric Sanchez, Managing Partner at Maestro Strategic Partners, about what it really takes to implement AI inside a law firm without creating chaos, wasted spend, or cultural resistance. This conversation explores AI adoption for law firms, legal operations, law firm workflows, and personal injury firm growth through a practical leadership lens.

Eric explains why AI is no longer optional, why most firms are still unprepared to use it well, and why leadership has to start with people and process before technology ever enters the picture. From workflow mapping and staff buy-in to AI policy, agentic AI, and the future of operational leverage in plaintiff firms, this is a grounded conversation for law firm leaders who want to scale intelligently and stay competitive in a rapidly changing legal market.

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Learn more about Synergy’s approach to healthcare lien resolution and firm operations.

Trial Lawyer View is a podcast for personal injury lawyers and legal professionals who believe that great verdicts are only part of the equation.

Hosted by Jason Lazarus, the show focuses on what happens behind the scenes of elite trial firms. Each episode features conversations with trial lawyers, firm leaders, and industry experts who have lived the work of building, operating, and scaling successful personal injury practices.

We go beyond marketing tactics and courtroom strategy to examine leadership, operations, and the decisions that protect outcomes after settlement. This is practical, peer-driven insight for firm owners who want to build stronger operations, lead with clarity, and deliver better results for both clients and teams.

New episodes of Trial Lawyer View are released every 2nd and 4th Monday at 5 AM ET. 

Watch on YouTube

If this episode gave you a useful perspective or sparked an idea for your firm, consider liking the video, leaving a comment, or sharing it with a colleague.

This podcast has been brought to you by APodcastGeek

Learn more about Synergy’s approach to healthcare lien resolution and firm operations.

Trial Lawyer View is a podcast for personal injury lawyers and legal professionals who believe that great verdicts are only part of the equation.

Hosted by Jason Lazarus, the show focuses on what happens behind the scenes of elite trial firms. Each episode features conversations with trial lawyers, firm leaders, and industry experts who have lived the work of building, operating, and scaling successful personal injury practices.

We go beyond marketing tactics and courtroom strategy to examine leadership, operations, and the decisions that protect outcomes after settlement. This is practical, peer-driven insight for firm owners who want to build stronger operations, lead with clarity, and deliver better results for both clients and teams.

New episodes of Trial Lawyer View are released every 2nd and 4th Monday at 5 AM ET. 

Watch on YouTube

If this episode gave you a useful perspective or sparked an idea for your firm, consider liking the video, leaving a comment, or sharing it with a colleague.

This podcast has been brought to you by APodcastGeek

Transcript

Coming up...

SPEAKER_01 0:00

With A min, it's exponentially grown. And so what's happening now if you don't want to dump them now, your dumb years behind it.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

That is Eric Sand's managing partner and monitored strategic partners. He believes the real risk is not experimenting with AI, but falling behind so fast that catching it up becomes a permanent appeal battle.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

It's no longer nice to have technology, it's table stakes in today's legal landscape.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

He explains why AI is no longer optional for long firms. It's about building the right foundation, making clear decisions, and ensuring your firm can compete in a rapidly changing legal market.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Firms have not codified their own existing workflows, and then it's very difficult to bring in a technology to improve that workflow if you don't actually know what it is that you're improving.

Meet Eric Sanchez

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Today he shares where AI implementation truly begins and how getting your processes and people aligned first determines whether technology becomes a growth engine or a costly mistake. I'm Jason Lazarus, and this is Tri Lawyer View. You and I met in the fall of last year at the Supio conference. And I know you go to a lot of these conferences and speak about AI and implementation. And I'm curious, why is that so important in your view right now for law firms to be thinking through what all of this may mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Yeah, it's really uh a remarkable transition that we're seeing just societally, forget law firm, just societally. One of the big things that I think make that makes AI really different uh than perhaps some of the other technological shifts. Like consider, you know, uh a number, we're we're both old enough, unfortunately, that we remember um when there was the big shift of on-premises uh server-based, you know, CMS or whatnot to go in the cloud. And that was a big pain point. COVID changed that. Once COVID happened, everybody wanted to be into the cloud. And so I remember how difficult it was communicating to consumer base, because at the time I I was involved with a software company trying to sell product. That's very different than what we're seeing now with AI. So, with a lot of the big companies, whether it's Anthropic, Gemini, Chat, the it's at the consumer level, people are using AI. You probably use AI today. I know I do, you know, and and it has nothing to do with work necessarily. It could be a recipe, it could be, you know, we had we had some weather up here in North Carolina. I had to repair my uh my gas fireplace, and I went to AI, and sure enough, it showed me exactly how to troubleshoot and resolve it. The reason that's important is because the stigma, a lot of the utility of at least generative AI, is really been kind of um mitigated because the consumers are using it at you know at the very, very bottom level. So you're having uh more of an appetite or awareness at the law firm level at the very bottom, all the way up the strata. That's very unique than other technologies that we that we've seen. The other thing is um, you know, it's very different. You might recall uh Moore's law, which uh Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, said every two years the number of transistors doubles. With AI, and it's every six, seven months, it's exponentially grown. And so what's happening now, if you don't adopt now, you are your dog years, you know, you're dog years behind. And a lot of competitors, you know, I was listening to um what the managing partner, I think Steven, um, was on a panel with me recently, and he was talking about what Sweet James was doing with AI, and they've been doing it for two years. I mean, they are light years ahead of a lot of firms, and so it's no longer a it's not a nice to have technology, it's it's table stakes in in today's legal landscape.

Where AI implementation really begins

SPEAKER_00 3:58

So, given that, if a personal injury firm wants to start using AI tomorrow because they're dog ears behind and not already using it, where does leadership begin to implement? And how do you make sure it's used the right way instead of exposing the firm to risk and liability?

Which law firm tasks create the fastest operational leverage

SPEAKER_01 4:21

From my perspective, there are three legs to the table of success in a law firm people, process, and technology. And so what we're talking about is adopting that technology piece. But in order to properly adopt that technology piece, you have to first address your people and your process. Perhaps you can do it concurrently, but those things have to be addressed. The number one thing that we're seeing is that firms have not codified their own existing workflows. And that's very difficult to bring in a technology to improve that workflow if you don't actually know what it is that you're improving. Consider the law firm that maybe has six paralegals and the pain point of ordering medical records. Very frequently, there are six different ways of ordering medical records, not one unified way. And so when you're trying to adopt a technology to solve that problem, you end up having six problems to solve. When in fact, the best practice is to figure out what's working for all six of those people, codify it, and then essentially legislate that that's the way that we do things in the law firm. And then the other piece is your people. You know, we talked offline about how important those personas really are within a law firm. And so this is an oversimplification, but really there's kind of four big personas. You've got that visionary persona. Typically, that's the firm principle. I want to grow, I want to be the biggest law firm, I want to make a ton of money. Uh, then you'll have a champion person, you'll have somebody who like wants to adopt the technology. They're really uh pro, but then you've got the blocker. Um, I think this is as common as anything in a law firm. Uh, typically we see this in the form of the 20-year paralegal. We've always done it that way. Why do we need to change? We're perfectly good this way, that way. And then you've got the middle of the road people. They just want to get their job done and they want to do it as painless as possible. Those are the three dominant personas, and they're very, very important to identify. With the visionary, we got to reel them in. Sometimes they're too far ahead and they have to be grounded with reality. The champion can almost see too much of the success and really not pay attention to some of the legitimate pain points. The blocker is obvious, right? I don't want to adopt anything new. And and in this day and age, because the table stakes are so high, it used to be you could take that blocker and isolate them at different parts of the firm and you'd be fine, hence the 20-year paralegal. But if they're stopping you from taking that next necessary step to compete, I mean, we're seeing AI, you know, I just gave a presentation on AI workflows, and the bulk of that workflow presentation was in marketing, right? You're seeing it voice, you're seeing it digital, you're I mean, all across the board. And if you don't think it's going to impact your business competitively, I mean, you're you're living in a fan in a fantasy land. And so getting those processes nailed down, identifying those personas, really, really critical points to AI adoption.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

I want to hone in on something that you just talked about, which is the pain point analysis and identifying workflows. It seems to me that the lowest hanging fruit for a personal injury firm would be to focus on administrative level tasks that they can remove from paralegals and other legal professionals within the practice to allow them to focus on more high-level legal work that either increases value of their cases that they're handling or move cases through the pipeline more quickly. And so I'm curious, you know, and we've looked at this because part of what we do is take that administrative burden off of the plate of law firms. Is what workflows do you focus on that give you immediate leverage and really accelerate the firm's ability to scale and grow without adding more headcount?

SPEAKER_01 8:20

One of the things that I recommend is that you create work groups within your firm to identify those pain points. You have, and I would do it at the ground up. Too often we do it top down. Uh the product selection is made at the top without input from the staff. And then you don't get adoption, you don't get traction, you don't get the bang for the buck that you should. There's a there's a there's a fiction out uh societally that people hate change. I don't actually think that's true. I think people hate change that's not beneficial to them. If people understand that the change is beneficial to them, they embrace it. So if I talk to a paralegal, and you know, I mean, here's a here's a great use case. Say, okay, I'm gonna pull 100 paralegals on a scale of one to 10, 10 being amazing and one being terrible, how would you rate opening claims with an insurance company? I've yet to meet the paralegal that puts that above a three. And so that would be a great place to start on a pain point and say, well, how can we how can we open up claims more expeditiously? I mean, that's just one of their the the verifying liens. Verifying all of them. Exactly. Verifying liens in your world, verify the whole line. And so if you start to bubble up this list, now listen, technology is no panacea. Um, I mean, it may be in the sales cycle, they'll promise you they can do all of it. And and you know, maybe there's a certain product with a certain firm that that's true. But for the most part, especially lawyers, we we focus on the the outliers instead of the the bulk of it. If you have a solution that's solving 80% of your pain, that's a win. That is a win all day long. And if your staff has identified these pain points, it's been affirmed by managers and leaders in the shop, um, that is a recipe for success.

Why buying an AI tool without a strategy is dangerous

SPEAKER_00 10:07

And one of the things we've really thought through in terms of deploying some new solutions for law firms that we work with is not just pure AI, but AI with human in the loop that you know it can do more than what purely AI can do on its own. Because there are limits, at least right now. We'll have to see, you know, with with the way things are going with agents and and the development in that regard. But right now, you know, there's and there's still some value of a human expert in the loop. So it's gonna be interesting to me to see you know how things progress in that regard. And you know, whether it's law firms integrating technology with their human people still in the loop to some extent, too, right? I mean, that's part of it. So it is interesting, you know, in in my book to see what the direction of that might be. I wanted to ask you foundationally, though, for a law firm, just simply exploring and then spending on AI tools, it seems to me that that is dangerous without the foundational work of what is your AI strategy and what is it focused on. So I wanted to get your your insights as it relates to that, because just checking the box, yeah, we've we bought an AI tool. What does that mean for the law firm?

Will law firms build one AI stack or many specialized tools

SPEAKER_01 12:24

That's a great question. And it's it's a different answer for every law firm. And and let me tell you as foundationally to your point, one of the very first things that I think every law firm of any kind, plaintiffs or otherwise, you should have an AI policy within your shop about what's inbounds and what is not. If you think, if you're a law, your listeners are running a law firm and they say 20 people in that law firm, I suspect you will have people using public, I'll use the phrase public AI tools for their day-to-day workflow. If you don't have a policy in place where you're at least doing at a law firm level CYA, we do not allow for that. You you will not have any public identifying or personal identifying information uploaded. You won't, you know, a variety of different protections. That's the that's one quick, easy, cheap way that a law firm can at least create an initial barrier of CYA protection. Two, and I know that you weren't saying this, but I don't accept as true that it's a one a single AI tool that's necessarily the solution. Um, consider a medical malpractice law firm. You have a firm that they're actively litigating and they might need an AI tool to develop medical chronologies. And there are some tools, and by the way, you can ask 10 law firms their opinion on the AI chronologies out there, and you might get 10 different uh solutions as far as they're concerned. But then when you say, well, what is the standard of care for this procedure? You might need to go outside and go to an anthropic or a Gemini or something like that and look deep into what are the standards of care apart from the tool that you're using to analyze the medical records. There's a whole different way of using that. And you don't want to put obviously any public or personal identifying information in there either. Marketing, we talked about that. There are some tools. I I mean, I must spend, much to my partner's chagrin, um hours on AI tools a day. And I'm looking at marketing things, how how voice tools are doing versus uh images versus videos. All of those things are very niche and very focused. We're coming in contact with a lot of firms that think it's like, well, should I go even up? Should I go, you know, Supio, should I go Eve legal? That is a very elementary view of the whole panoply of AI solutions out there, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

I think you're saying, and I would agree 100%, is it's gonna be a tech stack that's ideal for that particular practice area and looking at the kind of tasks that it needs to handle. So it's integrating case management software with more broad AI platforms like Assupio, even up, um, Eve. And then you may have some more specialized AI solutions that are in certain niches like medical record retrieval and medical claim information or R space that the law firms may put together that ultimately accelerates their practices by letting them scale and grow because the tools are optimized for that particular practice. Is that what you're thinking?

How leaders reduce fear and build buy-in around AI

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Absolutely. I actually think the market uh on the on the high level, I think is going to bifurcate. I think you're gonna have some firms that are gonna go for the all-in-one solution intake case management AI. And I think you're gonna have other law firms that are gonna stay in their existing case management platform and then go kind of all a carte pulling in these AI tools. You know, but to your point, um, you know, if you had an AI tool that focuses on, you know, lean resolution, you have an AI tool that focuses on lead follow-up, you have an AI tool and they're working for you and you like them, or they're they're probably better for your firm as a solution than an all-in-one solution might be. That's not to say anything negative about the all-in-one solutions. I think there's plenty of room in the tent to say, oh, okay, I'm gonna go with uh with an even up, and they're gonna be my my number one guy. However, I like the way this tool does this, I like the way this tool does that. Why would you not create an array of a tech stack, as you say? Let's talk about telephony. What's the what's the solution in telephony right now? Well, right now, gun to my head, if you ask me, I'd say Zoom. I think that the Zoom platform is fantastic. Um, having used Zoom and having used Ring Central. And again, just for your listeners, I don't I don't get a toaster for saying this. It's just what I've seen, you know, and so they're able to leverage AI in a totally different context that has direct application to the law firm. So just right there, now I'm talking about Zoom and my telephony. I might be talking about even up or some other platform as my as my primary, and then go with a with a marketing AI or whatnot. Pretty soon you're at five to ten different tools to run your firm. I I think every law firm is going to become a technology company, whether they like it or not.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

I wanted to touch on something that you alluded to already, but it as AI does reduce the manual work, the value of team members increases. And I'm curious about your take, and I know you I think co-authored a leadership book. And so this sort of dovetails into that, and maybe you can talk a little bit about the book too, so anyone listening who's interested in reading it can find it. But how how should law firm leaders now think about culture, buy-in, fear reduction when introducing some of these technological solutions, including AI, to staff so that they see it as a leverage, that's something that increases their value and not a threat?

Why AI still fails at human empathy in client-facing moments

SPEAKER_01 18:28

So it's a real problem and it's it's it's it's palpable when we go into law firms. So, yeah, my partner Stacey Monahan and I co-authored Invested Leadership. And essentially, we believe that people are gonna matter more than ever. It may be true that the lower echelon of law firms are engineered out of jobs. You know, if you if you do something like Foundation AI or something like that, you may not need the mail team that you that you once had or something like that. But the reality is the people that you retain in your shop are going to become more important. I envision a paralegal being um like someone that's playing a piano, which each key is an agent, and they're they're managing their workflows by launching the different agents. That is going to require a level of technological sophistication, operational understanding, and the ability to emote with clients that's going to make those people worth their weight in goal. Those people will have options in the workplace. So we posit this idea in investive leadership that at the end of the day, people want to be cared for. They want to be part of a mission, they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. And what happens is you'll have a lot of firm leaders that are plastic and they're inauthentic. They try to be authentic, but they're they're really not. They just read some book and it's like, oh, well, we should do this to enhance our culture. Instead, we say, look at it like a C-suite. You have a tech company, they'll have the CEO, and the CEO will have a COO, they'll be a CMO, they'll be a C H R O, right? All of these people that are subject matter experts in their respective lanes. We take that principle and we apply it to leadership. We say, listen, if you want your people need to have uh gatherings or social gatherings, and you're yourself an introvert, you hate those things, don't pretend to be that. Put somebody on your leadership team that can meet that need and address them. You will then become that destination location for that super technologist, uh, you know, emotionally intelligent person that you're going to need in the uh in the next wave. Uh, we talked about earlier on in the podcast, I mentioned Sweet James. I have nothing but positive to say about how they're running their firm with regard to AI and how they're doing it specifically. They're not doing AI client-facing. They recognize that human touch. And by the way, the public polling on the perception of AI is not hot. So these law firms that have this idea that they're going to replace all of their people with AIs, I understand as a business owner from the PL why that's appealing. It's just not practical. It's not going to happen.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Well, and two, having been through uh the unfortunate experience of a personal injury case myself, it is intensely personal. And there is no place in my book, in that part of it, for AI to replace the human touch of talking to you know, whoever in the law firm is quarterback in the case, whether it's a paralegal that's doing going through discovery with you as the plaintiff or the lawyer who's representing you. I mean, certainly there, you know, there's probably opportunities for AI to provide information that you could push through text, through email, that's more updated in nature that perhaps improves the client experience. But that's different from the idea that somehow AI is interacting with you because that is what's going to feel impersonal and certainly not sympathetic to what you've been through. Because there's it's devoid of that.

What makes AI agents different from basic automation

SPEAKER_01 22:24

I agree with you. I I think that um yeah, and this is my opinion, and I realize that this is not a really popular take with some of our AI company friends out there, but I I really think they miss the boat focusing on um AI intake versus using natural language processing and agentic AI and other use cases within plaintiffs' worms. It is So difficult for an AI to understand um emotional intelligence. It's so difficult for it to pivot. I have a friend who's got an AI company and they're they're doing voice agents, not just for law firms, but like for a bunch of professional services. And he wanted me to kick the tires on it. So I pretended to be an intake. And I was, you know, rear-ended, you know, went through the whole thing. And they said, Were you injured? And I said, Yeah, I lost my arm. And the agent said, and it was a very human-sounding agent, by the way. It was the clicking, it had the clearing of the voice, you know, the whole night. It was really quite good in that regard. I said, Yeah, I lost my arm. He says, Well, did you treat? I said, Yeah, I lost my arm. I mean, you you see what I'm saying? Like that right there is that, and that's not even emotive. That's just reflexive, like just kind of the course of natural language processing. And that understanding that that response immediately put your firm to the back of the list when it comes to handling my case. Now, on the other hand, I think you could see things. Like, for example, what have we been on the we've been on the podcast for about a half hour now? The video and the voice of this podcast is enough material for me to create an avatar of you or I sending out to the client, checking up on, hey, I just wanted to check up on you, making sure you're okay. Obviously, this isn't really me, but hey, you want to talk to me? Click here. Hop, boom. That's how you use it. You use it complementary to the human, not in the stead of the human. To answer your other question about fear, my advice to my clients has always been to be straight with your people. If you think AI is a fulcrum to reduce your workforce, I think you're straight straight up with that. And I think that, you know, I mean, I wouldn't, I'm not advising your listeners to do this, but I've talked to plenty of principals. I know that is a legitimate ROI case that some of these principals want to make relative to buying these tools. Well, my advice is to be candid then, because the first time you start having a bloodletting, the quality people that you don't want to leave are not going to trust you anymore. And they're going to think that they're next on the list when the bigger, better AI happens. I think it's a much better take to say, we don't know. Because if you're able to be re-skilled and use these AIs, you're more valuable to us being able to use and leverage the AI than not. But I would not hide the ball. People are not stupid, and this fear is palpable within these firms.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

Absolutely. So we you talked a little about AI agents and the development of that and in the news recently is Claude Bot, which is like insane. Like when I've I've looked at this and scary, I I saw something today and it was talking about how somebody had created it, and somehow it started calling them on their cell phone and asking them if they could help them. And then when the person took the call said to the AI agent what to do, the AI agent started doing it on their computer, which is just next level insanity. I wanted to ask you, you know, what separates AI agents from basic automation that law firms are doing today? And where do you think that agents will deliver real value inside of a personal injury firm in the near future?

Why copying another firm's tech stack can backfire

SPEAKER_01 26:17

That is a great question. And I hope if if your listeners listen to anything else, I hope they listen to this segment right here because a lot uh, and this has been going on since you know 2015 and prior or subsequent, where automation has been masqueraded as AI and these companies are selling it as AI, and it's not AI, it's it's just uh it's an algorithm, it's an if-then statement that executes based on the if-then. So uh zap year for your zaps, you know, that's a great example of that. Now, if you have an AI, an AI should be recognizing the event and then making the determination on its own and then executing. And that is a unique and specific difference between simply having an automation and even within agentic AI, that is such a broad, you know. I was thinking in the shower today, and as I was thinking about this podcast, kind of how I would explain this. And I would I would say to your listeners, it's like saying you're a lawyer. Um, you know, I have a I have a son that's a lawyer and another son that's a one L right now. And I'm always interested in like their colleagues or, you know, the the one who's a lawyer, he he's doing workers' comp and personal injury right now in North Carolina. The other one is in law school. And of course, you you remember, right? Everyone wants to save the world. I want to do constitutional law, I want to do immigration law, all these different things. Well, lawyer is so broad. Are you MA? Are you transactional? Are you what kind of lawyer are you? That's what agentic AI is. And I have found that when I'm speaking to clients and I can use these metaphors and get them to start to think like that, they say, oh, okay, that makes sense. So there's agents that do certain things. Absolutely. I use agents every day that go out and bring me material, like I used to use old Google alerts. So how is it different? Well, I could say in a Google Alert, anytime um Jason Lazarus pops up on the internet, send that to me. Well, an agent, I could say, go to Stanford School of Business, go to Harvard Business Review, go to Warden, read these things and look for articles related to lean resolution and plaintiff firms that be very nuanced in it. It's consuming the information, distilling it, and then sending me the information. Obviously, I'm not doing it for you or lean resolution, but for me, I'm looking at frankly AI, I'm using it, looking at trends and PI firms. I'm looking for the young, the young Turks that are coming in trying to get up to that even up Supio levels, trying to stay ahead of the curve. It's been invaluable for me. Now that's a dumb agent. Like if I'm trying to use it in a law firm context, as I said earlier, I see it as like the piano player being able to execute for the right firm. I might say, I want an agent to go out to my clients. I'm a paralegal. I want my agent to go out to my clients and get um make phone calls to my clients because I want to have treatment reviews. I wouldn't use it as an agent that's actually getting the treatment information necessary, though I know some firms will do that. It might be almost like hold for the president and then get the human on the line and then they're talking with them. That still saves the paralegal all of the time of making those calls, getting through it. You could even go one up and just have it book time on the calendar. And so then the agent, we're already seeing this in dinner reservations. And you know, you can you can do this right now. And so I think those are just a couple of quick ways that the age agentic AI is coming to the fore. And I'm I'm aware of some larger uh AI companies that already have agents in alpha and beta ready to hit the plane of space this year.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

Yeah, I think that that frontier is going to be probably the most interesting one to watch and see how it really changes the practice. Because it it is going to for sure. One of the other things that I I think is going to be a challenge is for firms really to vet what they're going to implement. Because I think what happens is there may be a bit of copycat, oh look at that firm's tech stack, what they've built. We can, you know, just hop on that same bandwagon and try and use those in our practice. But it it seems to me that that is a recipe for it backfiring. And so the question I have is, you know, how should leadership evaluate AI tools based on their culture, workflows, and risk tolerance to deploy the right solutions for that particular practice?

When a firm is not actually ready for AI

SPEAKER_01 31:13

We are very much uh an industrial livings. Um it is you're it is absolutely the case, uh just as you say. So this firm's using X platform, I gotta use that platform. Well, that firm might have already had all of its workflows uh written down and understood. And they might, you know, for example, one of the questions I'll ask people is, well, what percentage of the of your matters do you litigate? Well, that's that's a pretty important question relative to the tool that you're going to select. If you were litigating 5%, 2%, well, what do we mean by litigating? I mean you filed a complaint, did you impanel a jury? Did you try a case? When you start to pull on that thread, that'll make it smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. So when I start to see these firm, these these AI tools out there that we respond to discovery better than anybody else. Well, if I'm a litigation firm, that that is a really important tool that I need to be paying attention to. If I am uh essentially a predominantly pre-lit focused firm, maybe I weigh that less. And just because you Morgan and Morgan uses X or you know, Sweet James uses Y, or, you know, insert your law firm, that doesn't necessarily mean that it applies to you. Also, if your firm's culture is one that's much more collaborative and you're making this decision without talking with your people, recipe for failure. 100% of the time, recipe for failure. So a lot of these firms don't take the time to know who they are. And it's really fascinating to me because I'm old enough to remember when TV advertisers were terrible and you know, non-TV advertisers were better than them just by virtue of the fact that they didn't advertise on TV, and then it was billboard lawyers, and then it, you know, all this other stuff. And the reality is, I think that's also true for how people practice. Maybe your model is you just don't you don't litigate, or if you litigate, you refer it out. Well, your tools probably need to be a lot more analytical in nature, probably needs to be more about bubbling up missing treatment, bubbling up those things that kill value in pre-lit cases. Um, so understanding who you are, what you want to become. And also, I would say larger firms should have the latitude to consider an AI tool for their litigation department that is different than their AI tool for their pre-lit department. The pricing model alone might dictate that. If I'm if you're gonna charge me$250,$450 a case or whatever the number is, and I'm a TV advertising high-volume firm, that pricing model doesn't work for me. I need a license model broadly that covers that. Whereas if I'm litigating high value matters, building that back to the client, that's a little bit more palatable, both for me and for the client, because the recovery is so great.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

I'm gonna ask you, do a little bit of a shameless plug, but isn't this part of what you guys do? Is help law firms in a consultative fashion figure out these things and then implement the right way?

What the AI-enabled personal injury firm of the near future looks like

SPEAKER_01 34:23

Yeah, this is an increasing part of our business. Our business has really evolved uh, you know, quite a bit. It was, you know, like you could put in an AI, what are the best practices for an intake department? Um, give me some SOPs for an intake department. Yes, you could you could absolutely do that. Implementing, executing, and getting buy-in, that's a different matter. That is a completely different matter. And there is an absolute right way to do it and absolute wrong way to do it. One of the things that we recognize, in fact, I could think of a client we had that engaged us to implement AI. And one of the things that we do is we drop into a law firm and we do a full analysis of the firm. Um, soup to nuts, top to bottom. We do it for two reasons. One, to give value to the client right off the bat. They they get a third-party view of their firm, with our perspective being in a bunch of other firms. The other thing is it gives us perspective. Is this an engagement that we want to go in? Are there landmines that we've identified that they they may not? We're not like some other companies out there, we're not a high-volume game. We're very concierge in our approach. We had a client um who engaged us to do AI, an AI implementation. We said, hey, we got to do this first. We go in there, and sure enough, we said, you have no business implementing AI in your shop. Uh, here's we gave them the playbook of what they needed to do beforehand because any AI, they had they had a lot of interpersonal issues really related to uh technology adoption. And so they really needed to take a step back and understand the why, create some different buckets or pockets of use cases. So if you had an earner, and this is common, I'm sure, in your listeners, you have an earner who is a successful litigator who is doing legal pads and redwells, they're not going to do anything. They they've got Susie putting in notes or whatever, Billy putting in notes for them, whatever, but they're never going to adopt it. Why to pick that fight? Just create an ecosystem for that person, especially if they're an earner. To me, that's obvious, but it's not so obvious in these firms. And so what we'll do is we'll go in there, and then what we'll do is we'll test their workflows. You might have a workflow that's been working for your firm, and it's going to change pretty significantly based on the technology that you adopt. We see probably 100% of the time, workflows within law firms exist because of the technology that they're using. So many years ago, right, most of the most uh PI firms or many PI firms were using uh needles. And a lot of their product, a lot of their processes were based on how needles was architected and what you had to do through needles. And so when they adopted these new technologies, they were trying to get the new technologies to do things the way needles did. Trial works, you know, that kind of thing. You see those things happening. And it was like almost like, no, I need a place to saddle my horse. You don't you need to let me do that? No, you have a car now and you have a garage. You don't you don't need a place to saddle your horse yet? Yeah, I still need that place. Those are the things that that we that we really try to identify with these with these shops.

SPEAKER_00 37:31

So I'm gonna ask you to uh take out your crystal balls. We're wrapping up the the episode. So if you look ahead to the next year or two, and originally I was gonna ask you five years, but when we were talking about this, I I think that you know, maybe a few months, maybe even. But what what does an AI-enabled optimized plaintiff firm look like operationally? And then what are the biggest mistakes that law firms will make right now that will leave them behind as this landscape uh of technology implementation, particularly in PI, matures?

Why using technology well is becoming a professional necessity

SPEAKER_01 38:15

So on the macro level, I think you're gonna see a lot of consolidation. We've been seeing consolidation over the the last uh five years or so, and it's getting it's getting more and more aggressive. The catalyst for that was typically PE money coming in, and you've got people kind of gobbling up law firms. A subset of that is going to be these law firms that did not adopt AI and they cannot compete, and they're not able to generate cases, and so they're going to be absorbed by these firms. Those firms are going to have to figure out how to translate those cases into their new environment. So if they get too far ahead, that's actually a pretty big lift, depending on the size of the firm. I think that the completely kind of apex predator, if you will, of AI use is almost certainly not going to be using a single AI tool. They will have created their own, and I don't mean this as a pejorative, Frankenstein tech stack, where they have um specialized tools for every facet. They're going to be able to understand things in ways that we can't presently compete with. So for example, um, it used to be a mass tort was breaking and it was almost who you knew, how you knew it, what's the signature injury. You have to cobble together a marketing uh shtick, you get it out, you get it up on TV. If you were really fast, you could do it, you know, in a couple of days or whatever. That's instantaneous now. I would be able to say um there was a security breach at Equifax and immediately come up with a game plan for what using AI as a thought partner and getting those things out. The AI-enable firm is going to be all over that. They are going to be competing in a completely different way than we are at present. They'll be competing not only for cases, they're going to be competing for talent. We already talked about the types of people using the AI. I think the agentic AI is going to be massive impact on how law firms operate. You are no longer, if you think about this, having been one that built dashboards, having uh patents related to building dashboards, those are going to become obsolete with the right agent. You won't even need to look at a dashboard with a with the right agent. The right agent is going to be able to communicate to you how many cases you signed last month, whatever other metrics you're used to looking at. There'll be some people that want to see it still, but you won't need to. And the AI-enabled law firm will simply say, here's the money for the marketing, execute, and then it's going to be able to self-regulate. We're not getting traction on TikTok like we thought. You know, we people, some people like to see their faces or whatnot. The AI won't care about that. AI is going to say, is it efficacious? What's the cost per case? Shift the money around, execute. That's what you're going to start saying.

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Well, you've been very generous with your time. One one last question, and it's very open-ended. Always ask it at the end of the podcast. As a legal technologist and expert in this area, what's your view?

SPEAKER_01 41:11

I think that we have transitioned from uh we we are admitted uh essentially the industrial revolution, technologically speaking, in our space. And it it is almost malpractice to not leverage uh technology. It's not a preference. It's it's necessary. It's necessary not only to compete, it's necessary to serve your clients. It's necessary to make get your clients maximum bang for your buck. And it is uh hubris to think that uh humans are better at certain things than the AI tools are. That's not to say they're gonna replace all humans, but to say I could outrun a car would be silly. I would submit it's also silly to say you can outthink an AI. And so you just need to figure out how to leverage it. And I think that the successful firms of tomorrow, regardless of size, are gonna be people that regularly use AI as a thought partner. They're regularly looking at how to improve their process, they're looking at how to equip their people to execute their vision, and that is going to be the firm that's gonna succeed tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00 42:24

Beautiful way to take us out. If anyone listening to the episode is interested in Maitro, can you give them a brief overview of what you guys do and then how to get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01 42:35

Sure. So we we work with firms from uh intake to exit. So everything from getting them tight on their marketing uh intake process all the way to getting them tight when they're getting ready to make an exit. You can reach me at Eric at evolvelaw.ai. Our URL is now evolvelaw.ai is a great example of that. We changed that to anticipate the uh coming need of firms that have to transition transition their old workflows to AI-enabled workflows. And so that's the name of the game for us is making law firms better, leveraging technology, people, and process.

SPEAKER_00 43:11

And we'll include all that in the show notes for today's episode. Eric, thank you for joining me today, and we'll see everybody on the next episode. Thank you. If today's episode gave you a new perspective on how your firm operates or sparked a useful idea, consider sharing it with a colleague and be sure to follow the show so you don't miss future conversations with leaders across the personal injury space. Trial Review is brought to you by Synergy, a strategic operations partner helping personal injury law firms resolve healthcare leads more efficiently. If you're looking to accelerate case flow and allow your team to focus on high-level legal work that moves cases faster, consider partnering with Synergy. I'm Jason Lazarus, and I'll see you in the next episode.