Where Do Law Firms Begin with AI?
Where do law firms need to start when it comes to using AI? Short answer... talk with your team. Learn why team communication should be the first part of the process.
This is probably the biggest question so far, and it's a tough one to answer broadly.
Short answer is it really depends on what stage your firm is at. Are you a solo/small office or do you have hundreds of employees?
Do you have clearly documented standard operating procedures (SOPs) or are you relaying everything from memory?
Currently the best ways I've seen AI used in law firms are helping with marketing related functions, data analysis, conversational chatbots, and document creation.
While AI can help your star performers focus less on the tedious jobs and more on the critical thinking or creative jobs, you still need to put in the legwork to understand their challenges.
Start by Talking With Your Team
The first thing I did with our team is ask them to send me a list of things they wish they could outsource.
If the team is asking for contract workers for certain tasks, then it's likely that you may be able to find a way to use AI or automate to get the job done.
AI tools are fantastic at executing simple jobs. They're not great at critical thinking.
Talk to your team or send them an email like:
Hey {insert team member name},
I'm reviewing all the work that we've done so far this month and noticed you've done a fantastic job at {critical thinking task here}. I would love to see more of that, and I want to try to help take some other things off your list!
Could you please send me a list of tasks that you're currently doing that you believe we could potentially find an junior assistant to help you? Ideally these are small tasks that could take up a lot of time like, but wouldn't be difficult for you to explain to someone with less experience.
Thanks,
{your name}
Hopefully they send you a document with a ton of little things they have to do, but don't necessarily like to do.
That's the ideal list to research what tools are out there to help them automate or at least reduce the amount of time spent on some of these tasks.
Examples of Tasks Where We Use AI or Automation
After doing the exact exercise mentioned above with my team, I got a list from everyone listing the tasks they don't particularly enjoy doing or ones that take up a lot of their day.
- Outlining Blog Posts - Great, we'll have ChatGPT help us move this along faster.
- Creating Subject Lines for Emails - Awesome, another ChatGPT project.
- Facebook Posts to Promote Blog Posts - We can use a combination of AI and automation to do this while we sleep.
- Cut Long Videos into Shorts - Opus Clip is a great AI tool to do this. Easy process change.
- Update Referral Case Statuses in Salesforce - We can batch & automate this so it's no longer a manual job.
Some of the best tasks to help your team are in the marketing, document creation, document analysis, and productivity spaces.
What Do You Do Next?
Ultimately, it's up to you as a manager or team lead to find all the areas where your team needs help. Get them out of the weeds and hand them the right tools.
We often refer to our AI tools as "Jr. Assistants" because of the type of work we complete with them.
AI tools are great for simple, repetitive tasks. If your team is getting bogged down or behind schedule, the first step is to identify these tasks.
Next, find the tools that you need to help your team. If you're having trouble finding great tools, let us know! We test a lot of software and may have a great solution for you.