One Thing You May Have Missed At This Year’s Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp

AI was everywhere at this year’s Law Firm Simmer Reboot Camp, but if you weren’t looking for it, you might have missed it! Of course, we had an entire panel dedicated to Generative AI, hosted by Mathew Kerbis.

But AI wasn’t just brought up in legal tech discussions; our legal marketing and law firm management panels were all over the topic as well! If you ever doubted AI was going to transform the legal world, this year’s camp indicates it’s here to stay!

Below, we’ll be discussing all the ways our guests were discussing AI’s impact on the legal sphere outside of our Gen AI panel. If you’re at all interested in the ways this technology will transform the future of the legal industry, read on!

AI In Law Firm Management

Our experts for law firm management ranged from practicing attorneys to former attorneys who now coach, and when AI came up in conversation, they all agreed that it’s a game changer for the legal profession.

Many of our experts themselves use AI note-taking tools to be more present in important conversations, whether they’re talking to someone with a legal matter or a lawyer themselves. It can be difficult to truly listen to a client’s concerns when you’re taking notes during the conversation, but if you don’t take notes, you might forget important details! Never mind the fact that many clients will expect you to take notes. An AI notetaker like an OtterPilot will help you more actively engage in these conversations without totally relying on your memory for later tasks related to the conversation at hand.

Our experts also said they use publicly-available, free-to-use tools like ChatGPT for ideation. Sometimes, when working on a creative project, it can be difficult to start from nothing but a blank piece of paper or empty word processor document. Even if you’re not using ChatGPT for content, as we’ll discuss below, feeding some of the content you want to emulate and prompting GPT for possible subject matter can be very helpful!

AI is also affecting the bottom line of law firms. If you bill by the hour, and your tasks are made faster with AI, then you’re going to reach a point where you can’t justify the price you’re charging for your work!

Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report estimated that AI could reduce hourly billing per lawyer by $27,000 annually.

We may see a crisis in the legal profession in the near future, if these predictions prove to be correct. The solution? Changing your fee structure altogether. Many of our experts suggested moving some business to a flat fee structure in the coming years, and Mathew Kerbis brought together several other attorneys who also have subscription law firms to discuss the benefits of the fee structure, especially in light of generative AI.

AI In Legal Marketing

If there was one thing our marketing experts agreed on, it’s that tools like ChatGPT aren’t yet up to the task of creating content for your firm’s website. As we discussed above, ideation is one thing; if you’re having trouble coming up with topics for blog posts, ChatGPT may have your answer!

But, based on the way that search engines scan and rank content, AI-generated content isn’t quite a replacement for well-thought out written web pages and blog posts. Humans can often tell the difference, and algorithms can too!

The exception here, and for marketing emails, as our experts discussed, is when you diligently review an AI-generated piece of content. You can absolutely use AI tools for marketing emails and even for web content, but you have to change them substantially. Emails especially should sound like they were written by a human!

Now, whether or not that amount of work is more than writing the content yourself is up to you to decide! Just like any other content you outsource, our experts all agree that making sure it’s the right quality to represent your firm is paramount to using AI in your marketing and SEO efforts.

One place AI might be more suited to the task of marketing is in analytics. If you’re a solo or small law firm handling your marketing on your own, AI tools can be instrumental in visualizing the performance of your marketing campaigns. Often these tools are built-in to larger suites of marketing management tools, or a particularly robust CRM. But you should be on the lookout for these kinds of analytics in the year to come!

AI In Legal Tech

Even before generative AI became a buzzword across the tech world, algorithmic AI tools had invaded the legal space. A lot of legal software was boasting the inclusion of AI before large language models became available to the public.

This kind of AI is at the center of the pre-ChatGPT automation craze in the legal industry, and the introduction of large language models hasn’t changed that trend at all. In fact, that factor has, if anything, increased the speed at which automation technology is accelerating in the legal industry.

At a panel hosted by Gavel, Brittany Hernandez demonstrated the power of this kind of automation in document drafting, and while that’s a big change for the legal profession, it’s only one facet of what’s coming to the legal world. If you’re looking to scale up your law firm, using AI-assisted automation tools will be key to making sure you can handle the work coming your way; that much hasn’t changed. What has changed is the speed at which the technology is moving, and how much you’ll be left behind if you don’t get on board.

Between the first and second weeks of our Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp, however, something changed, and our tech experts were keen to discuss it. The ABA released Formal Opinion 512, the body’s first ethical guidance on the use of generative AI tools in law.

Overall, the ruling is very common-sense: You should ensure that confidential client information is never compromised by your generative AI tool. You have a duty to inform your clients that you’re using AI. But what was most interesting was the ABA’s discussion of fees: you can charge a client for prompting an AI and editing its responses. Of course, that time is much less than what you would have spent writing those documents yourself; our tech experts stressed that the billable hour may not be the model of the future for law firms.

One Place You Won’t Find AI

The legal world is quickly adopting generative AI technology to solve a host of problems and generally make being a lawyer easier.

79 percent of surveyed lawyers in Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report have made some kind of adoption of AI tools into their law firm.

But if there’s one place you shouldn’t adopt AI, it’s in your phone answering.

That same report found that 48 percent of law firms aren’t picking up the phone when it rings.

You might think this is a ripe place for an AI answering bot of some kind, but you’d be wrong. New leads hate talking to bots, IVR phone trees, and leaving voicemails.

When new leads call your firm, it’s because they want to speak to a live person about their legal issues. If you’re not answering when they call, they’ll just dial up the next law firm on their list. Luckily, Answering Legal is here to help.

Here at Answering Legal, we have 100 percent human, U.S.-based, bilingual virtual receptionists available 24/7 to answer your calls. Our virtual receptionists only answer for lawyers, which means we’re able to train them for months on legal procedures and terminology so they can get the results you need.

That’s not to say we don’t have good tech, either. Our answering service software integrates with top law firm software, like the CRM you’re using right now. New client intakes will be automatically pushed to your CRM., allowing you to use whatever AI tools in your toolbox to analyze, summarize, or automate your phone answering.

Don’t be part of the 48 percent of law firms who miss calls from incoming business. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.