All About AI - Part 3 - Legal Operations Efficiency

[Music] Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Welcome back to Episode 3 in our AI series. Think about those time-consuming tasks that zap your team's energy. Time tracking, billing, document management, and then there's discovery and document review, and maybe even some contract analysis, depending on the type of law you practice. This stuff just takes hours. And it is important, but it's really not the best part of being a lawyer. And you guys know better than I do. That is not the end of the list. But picture this. What if you could supercharge your system so that every search during discovery is lightning fast? And what if new documents were immediately summarized for you, with one-click access to explanations of references, statute, other documents? But AI isn't going to stop there. the hours reclaimed, the precision we can attain, and the insights we can unearth with this technology. AI is not just streamlining law practices. It's propelling them into a completely uncharted territory. But how does this actually happen? Let's dive into the five big areas where AI really shines. And as we go through these, I'm going to avoid most of the specific products and tools that law firms are using right now. There are plenty of places for you to find these tools with a quick Google search. We're going to try and stay focused on the principles of what we're actually trying to do so that we can attempt to cut through some of the noise of the current boom in AI. So what is AI really doing for us? To help us contextualize a little bit, let's talk about processes that can be improved in billing. So how can we make the billing process a little bit more efficient? What can AI do there to actually turn this process into something much faster, much easier? Number one is it can do automated data collection. AI powered softwares can integrate with all kinds of different tools that lawyers use like document management systems, communication platforms, and it'll start to capture the relevant data about their interactions. Whether that's meetings, calls, time creating documents, time reviewing documents, it'll capture all of this directly from these sources. Number two is data categorization. Once the data is collected during all of these processes, AI will then employ natural language processing or a type of model that will categorize these activities accurately. For instance, it can distinguish between research, it can distinguish between client meetings, drafting documents, assigning the correct billing codes directly to each of these activities. And number three, it'll then learn from patterns. AI algorithms heavily learn from historical data, whether you're training them or whether they're in operation already. As lawyers continue to use your system, the AI will become more adept at recognizing patterns and predicting billable activities based on context and past behaviors. Number four is document and invoice generation and review. With all of this collected data and all the categorized activities, AI can then generate detailed and accurate invoices for clients. These invoices are less likely to contain errors that are created by humans, which boosts both transparency and client trust. The generated invoices then can be reviewed by legal professionals to ensure accuracy before you actually send them to the clients. So you're not giving up any of your interaction here. Number five is communication automation. AI can also automate some communications related to things like billing, sending reminders to clients for overdue payments, notifying them with new invoices, and it can even do some of this for just client nurturing, so you'll send information about the case to the user. This reduces the need for more manual follow-ups, enhances cash flow, and makes life easier for the lawyers. But AI's prowess shines brightest in its ability to analyze big data sets and extract meaningful insights. For example, there's obviously a lot going on, but what it can do is really kind of difficult to understand in a lot of situations. AI algorithms adapt and learn from historical data, becoming more and more precise over time. And in the legal realm, this translates to really effective products for a few different areas of your legal practice. Without me naming them all, I think you may be starting to see where things like review can help and learning from patterns and categorization. tasks really can bog down legal professionals or just members of your team. And at the end of the day, this isn't benefiting the client if they're busy. It means higher costs for the firm and it just means less attention for the clients. That's a lose-lose situation. How we turn this into a win is by starting to alleviate this burden. With automation and with AI specifically, we start to free up time for team members. Whether it's creating voices, reviewing intake forms, really anything under the sun, we're freeing up our teams to focus on what actually matters, the clients. So let's look a little bit more specifically at document review. We obviously can't cover every possible use case of AI, but document review, things like contract review, really these cover some of AI's foremost capabilities, what it's really strongest at. And again, we're going to talk about this somewhat in the abstract as every program is going to be different and have slightly different requirements and different flows, but we're already getting ahead by having an understanding of the fundamental concepts. So first, AI systems are trained on really extensive data sets encompassing all kinds of legal documents, contracts, case law, everything you can imagine. We give them access to everything that's relevant and sometimes some things that we're not even sure if they are relevant. We can go as far back as we want. these machine learning algorithms for our model helps our AI understand context, language nuances, and patterns within legal texts. But customization here is really paramount. When we actually get to work on these programs, we need to start tailoring the AI to our specific needs by defining the parameters for document categories, for keywords, for specific clauses, and concepts relevant to the documents that this AI model is going to be processing. AI doesn't come out of the box knowing what it needs to know just yet. We still have to teach it. But once we do that, AI's ability to rapidly review and categorize documents based on predefined criteria is a massive game changer. In contracts, AI can efficiently flag non-standard clauses, potential risks, and new programs are making reference material infinitely easier to access during review. AI also excels at identifying information within documents, such as key provisions, deadlines, involved parties, and based on the model's training, AI can quickly extract all these critical details, highlight the most important parts of documents, and even identify when there are errors that actually need a human to review. Imagine if your receptionist could accelerate the flagging of critical issues by forwarding you the results of any AI document scans that come back with problems. These tools are cutting back office time down left and right. They're extending unparalleled efficiency to the lawyers who choose to dive in and actually get engaged. But time savings is really just the most immediate advantage. Traditional manual document review is time intensive. AI accelerates the process, and this frees lawyers up to focus on more valuable tasks. It's a pretty easy equation. What's not as obvious and what is frankly getting a bad rap at the moment due to a bunch to genius lawyers who have decided to let AI take over their practices completely. What's not obvious is that AI adoption is leading to a significant uptake in accuracy in pretty much everything it touches. It eliminates the possibility of common human errors that occur during review tasks, not only by having immediate access to a massive amount of knowledge, but AI is also unnervingly consistent in its application of its predefined rules and training. comprehensive analysis projects, this just obliterates the possibility of an oversight error due to an error with the AI. There's no variation in the application of the rules. And this can be seen in a couple of ways, but there's no emotion. There's no leniency. There's no changes. It's just the rules. So as we start to combine the different capabilities that AI has, and we're integrating it throughout our processes, we're accessing a massively significant force multiplier. It enables scalability for us at every level, whether doing marketing for your firm and you're using predictive intelligence to understand what marketing sources, which contacts are most likely to generate more revenue for your firm, or you're preparing for some really intense litigation and you just need an extra set of eyes on whatever it is you're doing. AI's capabilities are so perfectly suited to so much of the work we do in the legal world. So your homework until the final episode of the AI series is this. If you really want to implement AI in your practice and make big gains, you need to look at what costs you the most. Whether it's your marketing, your payroll, your office, well, probably not the office, but what is the biggest expense you have every month? That is where we're going to start. Of course, if you've literally never interacted with any type of AI before, you may just want to start with some lower hanging fruit. But if you've been using Chad GPT for a few months or you're using Jasper, one of the gazillion other programs now out there, start with your biggest expense. Once you have that expense slash problem identified, look at why it's so expensive. It's likely that it's because of the amount of time involved. And that's where AI comes in. If your biggest expense is payroll, well, that number probably isn't going to change. But we can get more out of it. talking to your team and find out what they're spending the most time on. Figure out where AI can help them speed them up. Just don't make them do it. Sit down with them, figure out what they're working on and problem solve for them. It's likely the thing that they hate doing actually is the thing that can most easily be automated or at least assisted with AI. Your job as the principal of your firm, the owner of your business, your job is to go down the list and start identifying where you can improve processes with AI. The future of law, and really the future of most businesses like yours, lies in harnessing AI's capabilities to streamline processes, to enhance accuracy, and to ultimately deliver unparalleled value to clients. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosenadvertising.com for more. Thanks.[MUSIC] Three ju