Founding an AI native law firm
Hey all,
I have the opportunity to found an AI native law firm from scratch and would love to hear your feedback on it. It’s also a cooperation and research project so all involved partners only have the goal to prove this is possible and make the law firm as efficient and profitable as they can to provide a precedent for future development.
Cooperating with big insurers I could get as many cases as I want (and also pick only those, that go well with automation, first). So volume won’t be a problem.
I have also the chance to cooperate with a legal tech startup and use their development team and resources to build workflows and agents from scratch. The law film will be build from the ground with AI automation in mind, so every workflow will be as automated as possible from the beginning without the need to change existing and established but outdated workflows.
Resources like phone support, taxes and admin will also be covered by cooperating partners. All of those services are part of a development deal without destroying the economics, 100% of each case will be revenue and development team and case forwarding will imply no charge but rather benefit from the insights to develop their own tailor cut solutions.
Regarding the team size I’m thinking me and two paralegals supervising the AI for evident mistakes, escalating difficult decisions or unclear cases to me. I’m currently unsure but also consider a second lawyer as a backup in case of sickness and vacation.
The idea is to first define the most relevant flows and make them as AI assisted as possible to accelerate throughput: Client contact and regular updates, evidence gathering, first draft, summarizing and clustering arguments, proposed contra arguments backed by AI research and feedback loops.
The human in the loop would only need to review and fine tune the result and confirm the AI proposals regarding deadlines, next steps, arguments and drafts, so there are no hallucinations or bad outputs. In general the goal is to archive the same or even better quality and client satisfaction than the typical small general law firm with 5 or 7 lawyers (maybe more in the short future) but only with one or two lawyers and two paralegals and AI.
I think AI hallucinations and wrong proposals are not as bad as they used to be and will disappear in the short future. Anyhow this may still prove to be a bottleneck: If controlling the AI takes as long as it would to draft in the first place, there is no efficiency gain.
The major risk I see are time consuming tasks like court dates or cases that escalate in volume and time and cannot be automated.
The goal is to close 80% of cases out of court by settlements (also draft templates filled by AI) and to really cut on the time consuming tasks.
Do you have any experience? What would your gut feeling be about this? Is it possible or too early? Does the risk still outweigh the gains in your opinion?
I’m really curious about your insights!