I was excited to log onto the PBA’s free webinar “Reimagining Law Firm Efficiency with AI: Elevating Your Firm’s Success and Replacing the B-U-S-Y with AI,” offered by Clio’s Kate Bell on Monday August 25th. This was not the first free webinar offered by Clio. Based on previous experience, I was prepared to come away with some valuable nuggets of information and I was not disappointed.
If you haven’t taken advantage of the free webinars offered from time-to-time by some of PBAs affinity partners, or the PBA Solo & Small Firm Section, you’re really missing out. Just because you don’t earn MCLE credit, doesn’t mean that the value isn’t there for the taking. Almost all are broadcast over the lunch hour, so you can multi-task.
When I do a presentation, my goal is to provide you with one or two nuggets of “gold” that you can take back to your firm and put to immediate use.
A baby step at a time. Real change is rarely made in giant leaps; it’s accomplished by making continual tiny steps in the right direction. That’s why I get excited to take advantage of these free webinars. They provide yet another opportunity for me to uncover a gold nugget I can pass along to you, and/or use for myself.
In my experience, solo & small firms are both interested in and afraid of using AI in their practice. If your firm is one of them, I can totally understand. After all, what we keep reading are horrific news stories of law firms not properly reviewing and fact-checking AI-produced work. Consequences in the courtroom are becoming more serious as judges increasingly tire of giving mulligans to those who claim they didn’t know they had to check everything.
For goodness’ sake, every single seminar one attends on the topic of AI use in law firms provides warnings and war stories. And last year we received specific guidance in the Pennsylvania and Philadelphia Bar Association Joint Formal Opinion 2024-200 [Ethical Issues Regarding the Use of Artificial Intelligence]. So yes, it’s a tool one must use with care. You’d have to be hiding in a cave not to know that.
Yet, despite all the warnings, it is a tool that you can use right now, without risking your reputation and claim-free malpractice record. And without spending the millions that mega firms are investing. You may not realize it, but AI has the ability to be very useful in back-office tasks.
The webinar started with an important infographic from Clio’s 2024 Lawyer Trends Report. What they found was those lawyers working an eight hour day:
• Recorded only 2.9 billable hours of those hours worked (37% utilization)
• Billed only 2.6 of those hours recorded (88% realization)
• Collected 2.3 of those hours billed (91% realization)
Imagine how AI could open that funnel allowing more time to flow through, using more effective automatic or automated time-keeping tools. Ask any attorney who successfully implemented Law Practice Management (“LPM” formerly referred to as “case management”) software. Even the first products on the market included some level of time-tracking tools, and they have improved vastly over time.
Those lawyers will tell you that they were able to capture anywhere from 40% upward of those previously lost workday hours. Note, though, I refer to successfully implemented, which means they actually used the tools, rather than use the software merely as a warehouse for contact and calendar information, a billing tool, a conflict checker, and a place for someone to manually enter their time from a timesheet.
Deep breath, Ellen . . . let me step off the LPM soapbox I have been standing on for the past 20 years and return to those nuggets of information found in the AI webinar. The following were identified as tasks which law firms can greatly enhance using AI:
• Manipulating: text, tables, images and more
• Drafting: presentations, website copy, social media posts, books, etc
• Summarizing: long articles, reports, website analysis, recorded meetings, etc.
• Optimizing: website, content and more
• Explaining: new concepts or theories, gaining understanding (I especially liked the “explain to me like I’m a first grader”)
As someone who has taught countless attorneys and staff to use software, I know that effectively learning new things in a way that “stays” means simply use-it-or-lose-it. So, I decided to immediately put my newfound knowledge to work by creating a blog post and several social media posts from one of my published articles. I followed the information the seminar provided on creating meaningful prompts for this purpose. I created a document which provided step-by-step instructions for Copilot. I told it:
Who my audience was
To utilize one or more meaningful pieces of information from the article for that audience in each social media post it created
To summarize the most important points to engage the reader in the blog post
I provided a range for how long each social media and blog post should be
I stated the primary goal was to interest the reader to go to and read the whole article, with a secondary goal of engaging the reader to make a comment on the social media post
And I instructed AI which article to use
I was astounded by what was produced in seconds. Truly the information provided in the webinar was right on point, because what came out was damned near perfect! And this is where Copilot started to teach me how to use it even better. It asked me whether I wanted it to create accompanying artwork, and if so, what kind. It asked whether I wanted it to customize the social media posts for each platform, e.g. LinkedIn v. Facebook.
It was a fascinating experience. And by the time I was finished, I had modified my instruction document several times in order to achieve a higher level of sophistication next time without the back-and-forth. And what I learned is that all my precious “me” time that I have been sacrificing for years for a very meager “reuse” of my prior work product was going to be a thing of the past. Look out social media, I’m going to be back big time!
A big thank you to Clio for the valuable webinar. It pushed my “call to action” button sufficiently. And it will no doubt pay off in spades. Is it your turn next?