HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS HELPING SOLVE THE NEEDS OF
SMALL LAW PRACTITIONERS
By Suzanne McGee
Digital innovation has caused upheaval in industries from manufacturing to entertainment. Now it’s finally leveling the playing field for smaller legal firms, giving them the kind of resources and insight until recently only accessible to large global partnerships.
When it comes to size, Stephen Weigand is confident that his Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio-based law firm can match behemoth law firms. The latter have more attorneys, cover more areas of specialization, and can even brag about having more square footage and bigger libraries.
“With about 20 attorneys, we do not cover all of the practice areas at larger firms, but for the areas we handle, particularly commercial litigation, we are willing to compete against any firm of any size,” he says. But these days, competing successfully as a smaller law practice isn’t just a numbers game.
The commercial litigation practice at Weigand’s firm, Faruki, doesn’t have a department dedicated to issues such as employment law, for example. But if one of their clients — a hospital network, say — needs Faruki to advise on an employee benefits issue, Weigand isn’t worried. In fact, he is convinced they would be able to compete head-to-head with their much bigger counterparts in a whole host of areas, from attracting new clients to representing them effectively in negotiations or prevailing in a courtroom.
The reason? The latest revolution in legal research technology “puts a lawyer’s skill and expertise in the driver’s seat,” Weigand says. New artificial intelligence tools give lawyers instant access to vast amounts of information and analysis online, but also the ability to turn that into actionable insights. They can be reminded to check specific precedents and the latest rulings, or be directed to examine where an argument might be incomplete. That leaves the lawyers themselves to do what only they can: think, reason, develop creative arguments and negotiation strategies, provide personal service, and respond to a client’s changing needs.
The practice of law has changed significantly over the last few years. Many years ago, lawyers relied on reference materials in print. These later led to reference solutions online. “At LexisNexis, we’ve evolved further with a focus on decision tools. This emphasizes the placement of data insights alongside reference activities. It means lawyers can access reference materials, but also have analytics powered insights to improve legal decision making. We call this approach data driven law,” said Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer at LexisNexis Legal and Professional, part of RELX.
Using AI to Tackle Small Practice Challenges
A host of very specific issues has always confronted solo practitioners and smaller law firms. Ultimately, most boil down to how many hours there are in a day and how many attorneys and other qualified staff there are to tackle a client’s problems. In smaller practices, both of these are more constrained than they are in behemoth firms, such as the 1,400-lawyer partnership where trusts and estates attorney Kim Civins worked until the spring of 2021. “If I needed background about a company, competitive intelligence, I was able to just hand off those requests to the library staff, who had access to all kinds of resources, some of which I never even knew the names of,” Civins recalls. Most of that “almost invisible” infrastructure vanished when she and a dozen of her colleagues left their old firm to join Harrison & Held, a 70-attorney firm specializing in estate planning law. While she was prepared to tackle routine tasks herself — such as setting up her new assistant’s computer — she worried that not having the right research tools would be a handicap.
Managing information effectively, being up-to-date on the latest rulings and legislative proposals and their implications, has always been crucial to any attorney. AI-enabled research now gives lawyers in smaller firms the ability to obtain information and analyze it better and more rapidly. This cuts the research burden, allowing for more hours to develop a thoughtful response to clients’ problems. The more efficient Civins’ quest for information becomes, the more time she has available to help her other clients, too.
Civins says her first question about joining Harrison & Held was whether she and her colleagues would have access to cutting-edge legal tools. “I need to be sure I have an easy way to access the information I need to help a client about something that I’m not an expert in.” So far, at least, she has found that working with LexisNexis’ Lexis+ — the AI-enabled research tool that Harrison & Held provides — helps with those concerns and keeps billable hours under control. “The program is intuitive,” she says. “It will point me in the direction of questions I hadn’t started to think about or issues I hadn’t yet anticipated.”
Civins cites as an example the fact that she has saved many hours figuring out how the rules governing advance directives (the legal documents spelling out someone’s wishes about their medical care) work in the state of North Carolina. That’s where a client of her Atlanta-based practice has a residence. She’s also been able to research what approaches to transferring the ownership of a car (other than simply signing over the title) are legal.
For Smaller Specialists, Streamlined Research Challenges
While Civins has specialized in trust and estate law for more than a decade, clients still tend to drop one-of-a-kind problems or questions on her desk. Some of these present a challenge because she has to get up to speed rapidly on the impact of a new law or ruling; in other cases, her clients need her to tackle something that she simply has not encountered before.
She’s currently using Practical Guidance to learn quickly about new legal developments, locate templates and access step-by-step guidance to complete unfamiliar tasks. Practical Guidance is a prime example of data-driven law. In commercial leasing for example, it offers thousands of deal points from recently negotiated commercial leases. The data is not publicly available and provides practitioners with a competitive advantage against counterparts who still rely solely on intuition and personal knowledge to gauge the leasing market.
She’s also relying on Lexis+ to delve into how different jurisdictions have treated song royalties as an asset. “An entertainment lawyer helped this person monetize those royalties, and now they don’t transfer via the will,” she says. That creates a research headache since this kind of question — how royalty income will flow to beneficiaries — is relatively unusual. Using Lexis+ gave Civins a leg up when it came to developing the argument, as its machine-learning capabilities rapidly started steering her to the most relevant cases once she had employed specific terms or phrases in her initial searches.
Aurora Austriaco, partner of a nine-attorney firm in Chicago, says that fast-paced developments in long-established parts of the law can upend what even a veteran lawyer thinks she knows and understands. As an example, she points to her colleague at Valentine Austracio & Bueschel who has developed an expertise in labor and employment law, only to find that the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in significant legal developments in the workplace. For example, the issue of returning to work — and who is eligible for a religious exemption from new vaccine mandates — means anyone practicing in this arena needs to be able to keep tabs on the latest decisions across various jurisdictions throughout the country, and hone in rapidly on the most relevant examples (something that the natural language processing tools associated with AI makes possible).
Automatic Analysis of Briefs
For Martin Prego, who has a Miami-based solo practice specializing in finance-related law, access to information has proven particularly crucial. Cryptocurrency ventures, as an example, are part of a rapidly-changing field in which the law varies widely from state to state. Florida is emerging as a hub: no fewer than four cryptocurrency exchanges have set up shop in Miami or plan to do so, and the city’s mayor, Francis Suarez, earlier this year declared his intention to make Miami the global hub for all things cryptocurrency. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also recently announced pilot programs to test the use of cryptocurrencies as a way for businesses to pay state fees. But federal laws, and those in other jurisdictions, create new problems and opportunities for Prego’s clients, both in Florida and beyond, as policy-makers struggle to address unprecedented questions. Is bitcoin a currency or property, for example?
“The ability to keep up-to-date in such a new and rapidly-changing part of the financial services world by default gives me an advantage,” Prego says. “It is invaluable in giving my clients confidence in my abilities.”
Lexis+’s “brief analysis” feature is a next-generation research tool that attorneys are now using frequently. The ‘brief analysis’ uses AI and machine learning technology to help attorneys build stronger legal arguments and assists in drafting litigation documents. Without a tool like this, a junior lawyer can spend countless hours researching legal precedent but is often left wondering, did I miss something. After uploading an argument or motions, they can obtain an automatically-generated review and de facto critique of everything from case citations to language usage.
Prego values the tool’s ability to flag when his citations are weaker than they could be and point to new law or rulings that may bolster his case. That, he says, helps him keep on top of the latest twists and turns in his chosen specialty.
Florida may be an attractive domicile for many new financial businesses, but Prego says Lexis+ has helped him identify when somewhere else may be even better. For example, Wyoming has been ahead of many other states in developing an online banking license, meaning that Prego’s clients who incorporate there don’t need to open brick-and-mortar institutions to undertake banking activities. “Sometimes a client may ask me whether it makes sense to form a corporation in Delaware or here in Florida — but I’ve discovered, thanks to Lexis+’s ability to compare and contrast what’s happening in different states, that forming their new entity in Wyoming might be best.”
Speed of Insight Gains Competitive Edge
Experts in one area of law can find their deep knowledge or focus gives them a competitive edge, one that AI-enabled research tools deepens. Others practicing in more general areas, such as commercial litigation, can also lean on the speed of machine learning to match or outperform larger competitors.
That’s what helps Weigand and his colleagues at Faruki thrive. Larger firms might have been able to devote more legal minds and more hours to ferreting out the relevant case law and precedents that boosted the odds of, say, gaining an injunction to protect a client. That’s no longer true, Weigand explains.
“Nothing has changed when it comes to the importance of acting swiftly to get an injunction for our clients; still these are often heard on an emergency basis, within a couple of days,” he says. But Lexis+ makes it easier for Faruki’s lawyers to line up the legal authority supporting their arguments.
Sometimes, the legal question at hand may seem straightforward. But it’s always possible to strengthen a court filing by using specific citations or relying on fresh legal commentaries from the bench to craft a distinctive argument. “When we run searches, it flags search terms and produces information that it believes is most relevant,” Weigand says. “I can type out key language that I’d like to find, and usually I’ll find something new or unexpected that’s very helpful. The overall research process becomes not just more efficient but more intuitive.”
A Leg Up in Attracting New Business
Aurora Austriaco says winning new business in the highly-competitive field of commercial litigation makes next-generation research tools critical.
“One of the features that I’ve found invaluable is Lexis+ ability to notify us whenever a complaint is filed against a client or a potential client almost instantly,” she explains. It may take days for details of a new lawsuit out-of-state to reach a client’s executives or in-house legal team; Austriaco can get the notification and some analysis to them within hours if this notification is set up on Lexis+ ahead of time. And the AI-enabled tools (such as keyword searches) help practitioners understand the jurisdiction where a case is filed; provide analysis of previous rulings by the judge who will be handling the case; provide a percentage of cases filed with similar causes of action and many other data that could be helpful to any litigation attorney.
Additional research tools that can help practitioners including Austriaco and her colleagues is the capability of Lexis+ to provide information about the plaintiff and their litigation record. This can be valuable information to have before helping a client decide how to respond.
Lexis+ also offers users an AI-based tool that calculates how different jurisdictions and judges are likely to respond to particular arguments, and how long it will take them to deliver a final judgment. These factors can help Austriaco and other lawyers advise clients on when it might be more cost-effective to settle a case and how much they will need to budget to battle on.
A Playing Field Leveled
By most calculations, a majority of US lawyers either hang out their own shingle, like Prego, or work within small firms, like Austriaco, Weigand and Civins. Whether they practice “toaster law” (they never know what will pop up) or devote their entire careers to honing their expertise in a niche arena such as cross-border income tax laws for US expatriates, they know that providing their clients with effective legal representation while efficiently managing their own resources is vital. That means they need the confidence of knowing they can research anything, at any time, anywhere.
What determines that these days isn’t the size of their firm, but whether they have the right AI-enhanced resources and tools. Being an effective case manager is less about having large teams assembling vast quantities of information than it is a matter of speedily digesting the most relevant information.
Martin Prego no longer worries about whether the tools can cope with the demands he places on them. Now in his second year of practice, he faces a new anxiety:
“What will I do if I wake up one morning and find it has gone away? I need it to thrive if I’m going to thrive.”
