Josh and Aaron continue the conversation around how AI has impacted the legal field and discuss FVF’s philosophy on how to incorporate it well.
Listen here or read the transcript below. FVF’s podcast is available wherever you listen to podcasts including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and more.
0:00:00.4 Josh Fogelman: Hey, Aaron.
0:00:01.1 Aaron Von Flatern: Hey, Josh.
0:00:01.9 JF: Have you seen the Terminator series?
0:00:04.1 AF: Mm, it’s been a minute.
0:00:05.9 JF: Well, you know what, I’m not gonna talk about the Terminator series as it relates to AI, even though that’s what you thought I was gonna do.
0:00:13.5 AF: I think you…
0:00:14.5 JF: No, I didn’t.
0:00:15.0 Dave Hawks: It’s because you did that the first time we talked about this.
0:00:17.2 AF: You just did, and you did before.
0:00:18.4 JF: No, I’m not gonna do it.
0:00:19.7 AF: Pretty sure Dave just confirmed.
0:00:20.1 JF: No, you thought I was gonna do it, but I’m not gonna do it. Instead, I’m going to just talk about AI in the practice of law.
0:00:29.4 AF: All right. What do you mean by AI?
0:00:33.4 JF: That’s what you’re here to answer.
0:00:34.7 AF: All right. Artificial intelligence.
0:00:36.4 JF: Sure.
0:00:37.0 AF: You and I were on this podcast before talking about it, but that was like a year ago, which in AI years is like 10 years ago.
0:00:45.2 JF: Eons. Eons ago.
0:00:46.5 AF: Yeah, a long time ago. Since then… And we had some bold predictions back then.
0:00:51.5 JF: They all came true, for the record.
0:00:52.1 AF: [laughter] I don’t think we predicted anything, but things have changed. We talked last time about ChatGPT and Claude and Bard and the different search, you know, options that were out there and how it might help lawyers. Since then, we’ve gotten some real-world experience using AI in our law firm, and we have sort of seen the limitations and also the possibilities. So, you know, just this morning, we were talking to a lawyer about our new system and what it’s doing. Do you want to talk a little bit about what we saw?
0:01:30.3 JF: Yeah. What I want to ask you is what you saw.
0:01:33.1 AF: Oh, well, you know, what I saw was probably not as detailed and clear as what you saw. But I’ll go ahead and summarize what I saw for your benefit. [laughter]
0:01:43.9 JF: I just want to make sure that you were paying attention.
0:01:47.4 AF: I was. And what I learned is that our lawyers are doing all the right things, I think, with AI. And we’ll talk about in a minute kind of this concept of whether AI could replace lawyers or AI could replace doctors or anything like that. Before we get there, right now what we’re dealing with is not that kind of AI. We’re dealing with AI that is more like assisting intelligence is the way I would describe it. It’s helping us to synthesize faster, to advocate better. And what our lawyers are doing specifically within our sort of software system is warehousing large sets of documents and getting all kinds of insights from those documents, chronologies, summaries. And also, they’re tying together all the threads of input information that we get. So, there’s faxes, emails. You know, phone calls are coming in, things are being logged. And in 30 days’ time, a lot can happen on a file.
0:02:55.5 AF: And so as you’re going through and you’re kind of working your caseload and you go back and check the next case and check the next case, what the system is doing now is kind of saying, okay, well, since you last looked at this file, just as a reminder, here’s all the stuff that’s open that you’re working on. Here’s some red flags, things that, like, maybe got scanned but didn’t get saved. Here’s some action items that according to the last meeting, someone was going to follow up on. And so, you know, as a lawyer, you have a chance to kind of confirm all that. And we’re asking, of course, our lawyers to look at everything. It’s kind of a trust but verify situation. We’re never going to take the AI’s information and say, okay, that’s the end of the inquiry, but it’s a great place to start.
0:03:43.5 JF: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think the last time we came here and spoke about AI, we had discussed some of the limitations of it that are currently prohibiting us from… Or were at that time prohibiting us from using it for very specific applications. Like, one of the major components of a personal injury case is understanding our client’s medical chronology. And kind of the way that we’ve done that historically is oftentimes either dug through the files on our own and really gone through and had to create these timelines on our own, or you can hire third parties to do that. And last time we spoke, there were a lot of issues with… Even though knowing that the technology was there for the AI programs to be able to do that in an instant, there continued to be limitations on our ability to use that because of HIPAA concerns and privacy concerns. And using some of these larger platforms where you have to basically provide all this confidential information into the public domain at the expense of your client’s privacy in order to get the information back in a detailed or summarized form.
0:05:01.2 JF: And we’re starting to now see some of the major software players in the legal space who have gone ahead and incorporated a closed sandbox, so to speak, where you can start utilizing some of those tools while also keeping the privacy of your clients. It stays only in your system rather than going out into the world. So it’s been really incredible to see how rapidly kind of the business world has adapted to the needs of consumers like our organization in order to start making some of these things easier. But there are still limitations.
0:05:44.2 AF: Yeah, the headlines are being made by sort of big AI, right? Like, Google came out with something that solved a problem faster than the fastest supercomputer could do by a matter of like a quadrillion years or something. You know, just incredible leaps forward in AI is happening on the sort of big scale where everyone’s kind of reading those headlines in the news and saying, oh, AI is making progress. But the real progress, from my perspective, is happening in sort of the small AI space, where a relatively small firm like ours is given their own sandbox. You know, it’s our own little ecosystem where we can work safely. We can’t upload our clients’ medical records to ChatGPT. That would be just an absolute disaster. But we have safeguards on this system, and it’s giving us really robust information on which to make better, faster, more accurate decisions. And I think the lesson is that, like we’ve said before, there’s never a point in time where you can say to your client, “Hey, we’ve advocated enough. That’s all the advocating we can do,” right? You can never stop improving the quality and amount of advocacy that you’re giving to your clients.
0:07:14.1 AF: And so getting another tool is allowing us to, I think, do a better job as lawyers, as human lawyers. And I’ve repeated this phrase, I didn’t make it up, but I think it’s a really good phrase that I heard from one of the reps, which was, essentially, you know, “AI is not going to replace lawyers, but lawyers who use AI are going to replace lawyers who don’t.” And I think that’s absolutely true right now. Because it’s almost like putting on super armor. You know, you can kind of just do more faster equipping yourself with this sort of secondary brain on top of your own brain. Which leads me to, you know, what’s the future of lawyering? We can kind of get into this topic of, do you think the demand for lawyers will go down? Do you think that doctors will start to be less important because of the robots?
0:08:12.1 JF: You know, I think in some instances, having the ability to interact with a bot that can guide you through a process like filing a small claims court petition or something of that nature will probably obviate… I don’t know that I would say that it would get rid of lawyers so much as it will help people who currently might believe they need a lawyer but can’t find one because there’s a gap in the types of cases that lawyers will take if they’re not financially viable from those cases that lawyers will take.
0:08:58.1 AF: Huge gap.
0:08:58.7 JF: Huge. We talked a lot about this on small claims court or justice court when we met last time. And I do believe, at least in the foreseeable future, that AI could be a phenomenal tool to help take people by the hand who can’t find an attorney to help them through their issue and help guide them through that process. I think the level of expertise needed to organize and prepare and present a case won’t pose a threat to many aspects of the practice of law for some period of time. And I think that it will help lawyers much more efficiently identify modes of advocacy for their clients, allow some more room for creative license to ask questions that won’t be super time-consuming to answer. For example, we were talking recently about how a client’s weight gain following an incident might be a useful fact for us to help explain to a jury what type of an impact this person’s injury has had on their life. Because, you know, weight gain and just loss of function in many ways is a massive, massive part of what we do.
0:10:35.1 JF: And being able to just ask the question, hey, ChatGPT or Filevine, let’s comb through these records and see if we can identify a pattern in this particular aspect of the client’s life. Being able to ask those kinds of questions and not have to dedicate four hours to combing through records and charting them by hand and just having an instant response will allow you to ask more questions like that for those lawyers who choose to use it and continue to have that type of creative approach to lawyering. I think there will always be room for creativity and advocacy that AI is not going to replace for some period of time.
0:11:20.5 AF: Yeah, I would say that in my opinion, the democratization of legal information is long overdue. The idea that the law belongs to law firms and that they can sell it like a commodity is crazy. You know, this is America. You should be able to know what the laws are that affect you and your family. If I have to call a lawyer and ask them, hey, does Austin City code require a certain type of handrail on a certain type of stairs, or something like that. You know, to me, that’s a failure. And AI is actually inserting itself in that space, where you can ask that exact question, and it’ll cite you the code section. It’ll go read it all for you and come back and be like, “Well, here’s the seven places where Austin City code speaks to stairs and handrails. Here’s where it actually specifies that the end of the handrail has to have a curved ending to it to prevent your hand from slipping off the end.”
0:12:20.1 AF: You know, all this information that you still need a lawyer to act on, but you yourself don’t have to grope around in the dark wondering if anybody can help you, wondering if it’s even worth calling. You know, I think the idea that you’re getting informed is just wonderful. That’s a great thing about AI right now. And as for lawyers’ futures, I would say that, this has always been true, there’s too many lawyers, but there’s not enough good lawyers.
0:12:47.4 JF: Yeah.
0:12:47.9 AF: And the difference between what AI can do and what human lawyers can do really comes down to the courage that it takes to be a good lawyer. You know, you can fill yourself with anxiety and think about all the different angles and the ways things can go wrong. What a really great lawyer can do is make a decision as to what the best course of action is. And they say, “Get on my back. We’re going up this mountain. And we are going to accept the consequences. We accept them, but we’re going.” And that sort of go mentality is desperately needed in the legal profession.
0:13:32.0 AF: Especially, you know, as I’m watching new lawyers come into the practice, I think that they were… You know, if I can be the old man in the room for a second, I said, this generation is sort of coming from a place of an environment in which the most interesting thing is someone’s deficiencies. You know, they’re not oriented in a way that just celebrates someone who’s going to just excel. And lawyers coming out of law school today need to understand that AI can do all the thinking now. What you need to be good at is formulating plans and executing on them, making commitment and having the bravery to go to court and stand in front of 12 people and speak from the heart and make it happen. And we’re always going to have room for lawyers like that.
0:14:21.5 JF: Yeah. No, absolutely right. I think as well, there’s just the human component and counseling component of the practice of law. Much of what we do is helping a client understand what their decision tree looks like and helping to guide them through the pros and cons of each potential decision. It’s not black and white. What we do isn’t black and white. There’s not always an obvious decision on how to handle a case or how to move forward or what to do in a personal injury case. And that’s true in many, many areas of practice. And I do think that the AI interfaces can help you identify what those pros and cons are. But there’s something about sitting down with a person who you trust to counsel you who’s seen different people make different choices and how those choices impacted their lives that builds on that level of experience that, you know, I would hope that there continues to be a need for. And I think the same is true in things like the practice of medicine. What about you, producer Dave?
0:15:37.7 DH: Yeah. So, here’s a concern that I know exists out there, partially because we’ve experienced it already, but thinking about you’re a law firm utilizing artificial intelligence, and the nature of the firm is personal injury. And so the optics of, well, is artificial intelligence replacing the personal component, where they’re now utilizing tools to even be further disconnected from us as a potential client? And one of the reasons why I know this is a concern is that we actually had someone interact with one of our Facebook Ads. And in that, there’s an automated response that automatically happens. When someone clicks something, there’s a, “Hi, how can we help you?” And the initial response was, oh, I wouldn’t want to work with a lawyer who uses AI to connect with potential clients.
0:16:28.3 DH: And so how do we help, how does FVF help, or how do people who are using AI help make it clear where they are using the resource to allow themselves to be better at what is most important and also protect from not accidentally saying, “Hey, by using AI, we’re actually removing the personal and human component of what we do,” and combating that. And so I know that’s a concern that people have. And obviously, we’re talking about it in terms of empowering us to be better at the things that require personal attention and human connection. So, as a firm who one of our core values is compassion, where we’re connecting with people at a human level and being available, and the reviews that we have talk about, how well we’ve done that, how do we incorporate that in a way that helps people not fear that we’re going to be going away from that by including more of something like AI, which artificial is counterintuitive to personal in some component?
0:17:32.0 AF: That’s a great question. And I think the answer is simply to push our lawyers and push ourselves to improve upon the personal touch. Because long before AI came along, email was already causing us to drift from our clients. Text furthered that. And, you know, it’s very convenient for our clients. And many prefer to not be, you know, receiving phone calls from us ’cause it’s disruptive to their day, and maybe they don’t have the time budgeted, and they prefer a text so they can answer real quick. But I think it’s up to us to take extra initiative in this context to make it clear to clients that we are humans using AI. We are not AI who’s just, you know, a money farm. You know, that’s really… I think it’s a great concern to raise, something that we need to be on guard against.
0:18:23.6 AF: And all law firms who do this the right way… I know there are a lot of maybe clowns out there, but Josh would agree, there are lots of law firms in this town that we think are diligent, are doing it the right way. They also need to be on guard and make sure… Because it’s not just about us winning the competition to be the best personal injury law firm. We’re trying to… We want the game to change. You know, we want the public’s perception to be that calling a personal injury lawyer is a natural and responsible thing to do. And so to make that happen, we’ve got to make it extra personal.
0:18:56.6 JF: Yeah, I think one of the responses too would be part of our goal in adopting AI in the law firm to the best of our ability is not to dissociate from our clients and automate the practice of law. It’s to more efficiently handle a case. Like, these personal injury cases are incredibly stressful, and they’re incredibly time-consuming. They take a very, very long time to mature. They take a very, very long time to resolve. And some of that’s inescapable just because of the time cycle of really trying to understand the extent of a client’s injury. Sometimes it just takes longer than others. But sometimes it takes a long time to get through a personal injury case because we are working in an old and inefficient system. And lawyers on the other side are bogged down with many, many, many, many cases. And we’re doing everything that we can to kind of keep our foot on their throats and pushing a case forward. But there’s a lot of information to digest in a personal injury case. And that’s sort of what we are. That’s what we do as attorneys, is we’re constantly gathering and digesting information, processing that information, and then trying to synthesize it and regurgitate it in some meaningful form of advice or action.
0:20:31.3 JF: And what our hope is as we continue to adopt and explore the uses of AI in our organization would be to make the gathering of that information and the processing of that information faster and more efficient and broader so that we can actually just do a better job for our clients without having any sort of interference with the personal nature of the case. Because the AI can’t replace the advocacy, and the advocacy comes from the development of a relationship with the person who has been injured, hence personal injury. So, I feel like, at least with our firm and our firm’s vision and philosophy, we certainly would not want to use AI to try to replace that personal relationship that develops between lawyer and client. That’s actually, like, the most rewarding part of the profession is getting to know the client, getting to understand the client, and helping the client through something incredibly difficult. I mean, we thrive on that. So, I think that there’s definitely room, a lot of room to continue to maintain the personal nature of this practice area while also utilizing the tools that are coming forth.
0:22:04.1 DH: Yeah. And also as one of our core values being education, like kind of what you were saying, Aaron, earlier about, how can the average consumer in the world utilize the same tools we’re using to get the information that they need? Because there’s always limited time that anyone has in their day. And so to be able to say, hey, client, hey, friend, hey, family member, hey, person in the community, here are resources that you can use to get more information about these specific things so that when we are in conversation or engaged together, we’re both on the same page. We both kind of know what is necessary, and that can be super helpful. So it’s not just, hey, how can we use this tool for our own business to be successful, but how can we share and educate how these tools can be used for everyone so that everyone is more well informed so that when they’re calling any lawyer or engaging in any sort of transaction, they know that they are making the best decision with the most information possible. And so being able to use that as a component of the way we serve the community can be really helpful and I think is, you know, what will make us successful.
0:23:19.6 AF: And to demonstrate that point, the next time we talk about AI on this podcast, it will definitely be AI.
0:23:26.1 JF: It definitely is.
0:23:27.1 AF: Like, I won’t be here.
0:23:28.1 JF: Yeah. No, just host podcast about AI.
0:23:31.8 AF: [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. But seriously, this is an interesting topic to keep our eyes on.
0:23:38.8 JF: Oh, yeah.
0:23:39.4 AF: Yeah, let’s do it.
0:23:40.5 DH: Awesome.