Some law firms are thinking about AI all wrong
Photo illustraton by Sara Wadford/Shutterstock
Artificial intelligence has been described as the new “industrial revolution”—and for good reason. Despite public sentiment ricocheting daily, practically every industry is now experimenting with this technology to solve their most pressing challenges and streamline operations.
But in the legal world, finding problems, identifying the root cause and strategizing a path forward is far more important than the grunt work of actually solving them.
As Albert Einstein once said: “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”
Understanding this fundamental principle is what separates lawyers of the present from lawyers of the future. Lawyers of the future already are leveraging AI to find unmet legal needs and grow their businesses. They use AI to not just do things better, but to do better things.
This is “justice intelligence,” and it is all around us. Trellis Law has recently released Law Firm Intelligence, which helps firms analyze strategic performance, scout top peers and spot business growth opportunities.
This is the new status quo.
AI can let legal professionals spot emerging legal trends and niches, find real legal problems and guide a business toward areas with potential impact for growth. Importantly, by unlocking AI’s business development capabilities, AI can level the playing field for companies and law firms—both big and small.
For example, lawyers specializing in mass litigation inundated the airwaves and social media in 2023, with ads promoting personal injury and product liability cases—an ad boom that comes as court dockets continue to grow. In fact, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the 10 biggest digital legal advertisers spent more than $106 million in 2023 on social media and digital advertising alone.
With ad spending on the rise, many small plaintiffs firms cannot compete in the global marketplace and are falling out of pace.
Through advertising and other means, plaintiffs attorneys invest significant time and resources to finding their next big win. And because they work mostly on a contingency basis, there is no return on this investment unless the case is ultimately successful. For many firms that do not use a billable hours model, the stakes are even higher—and could have a massive impact on a company’s bottom line.
The reality is that some legal professionals have not fully grasped and capitalized on the power of AI as a growth tool, not just an efficiency tool. It is easy to think about AI and immediately limit the technology’s capabilities to repetitive tasks—such as summarizing case information or scanning documents—that can be organized and handled by an algorithm. Yet this technology is ripe for so much more.
AI has been proven to help lawyers find legal problems and build cases across a spectrum of issues—privacy breaches by medical providers and unfair hiring practices at top corporations, and the list goes on.
It does so by extracting the essence of regulations, laws and case precedents, then comparing them against real-world events to determine if they support any legal theory. Additionally, AI—when leveraged properly—can determine how many people were impacted by legal violations and even predict the legal outcome. And this is just the starting point.
Tech companies, step up
With tech advancements growing exponentially, specifically in the segment of legal intelligence, plaintiffs law firms are not the only ones that must start thinking about the technology differently. To truly tap the potential of AI, technology companies need to come to the table with more creative solutions to facilitate growth; help companies and law firms discover more legal issues; and, more importantly, address them to create positive outcomes. This is especially necessary given mixed emotions surrounding AI and emerging technologies. Technology companies must rise to the occasion of developing human-centric AI products designed for good.
Simply put, AI will not replace the experience, empathy and knowledge of professionals, but it can—and should—be harnessed to ensure more legal problems are uncovered and more of them are resolved. Leaders who choose to tap into AI’s tremendous potential to fuel business development and compliance will lead the future.
This story was originally published in the February-March 2025 issue of the ABA Journal under the headline: “Think Different: Some law firms are thinking about AI all wrong.”
Evyatar Ben Artzi is the co-founder and CEO of Darrow.
This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.
