Future-Proof Law: Faster. Smarter. Better – Andrew Light – E2

You can hear Rob and Andrew discussing:

– The Key to Proper AI Implementation

– Agentic AI and its Multiple Uses

– Viewing AI as a “Co-Pilot” Rather Than “Autopilot”

– Legal Work Efficiency Management and Improvement

– How to Successfully Rewire your firm for Success

 

Connect with Andrew here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-light-99a534145

 

Transcript

Robert Hanna  0:00  

Welcome to future proof lore, faster, smarter, better mini series powered by faster outcomes and brought to you by the legally speaking podcast. We’re back with another cutting edge mini series, and this time we’re diving head first into one of the hottest topics in legal innovation, agentic AI, this faster outcome series features three short, power packed episodes with Trailblazers from AI and legal tech scenes designed to equip you law firms with the insights you need to adapt, innovate and win an AI powered future. So what’s it all about each 10 to 15 minute episode breaks down real strategies, tech trends and client first transformations that are redefining the legal landscape. So let’s get into it. Welcome back to the second power packed, legally speaking podcast episode of our future proof lore, faster, smarter, better. Mini Series today we’re focusing on action and impact. You don’t need to reinvent your firm. You just need to rewire how it works. Agentic AI is more than a concept. It’s a toolkit for smarter legal services. We’ll explore how firms can adopt it today without disruption and unlock serious ROI tomorrow. Joining me to break it all down with clarity and practical insight is someone who’s helped countless firms get there. Andrew light is the national sales executive at faster outcomes. So welcome to the legally speaking podcast.

Andrew Light  1:22  

Andrew, thank you, Rob, great to be here. Really appreciate it. Absolute

Robert Hanna  1:26  

pleasure to have you back on the show. And so when it comes to law firms just getting started, what’s the smartest first step in introducing agentic AI, in your opinion? I mean,

Andrew Light  1:38  

it’s really a great question. So as I travel the country, trying to talk to folks about AI, it’s, it’s one of those things that’s become inevitable, right? So, but it’s also a dense topic. So the question is very balanced. Where do I get started? So for me, what I always tell attorneys, it’s, it’s not starting smart. So you want to figure out what the right steps are and what the right areas of your business are to start looking at, how can we make this more efficient through technology. So the things that I want to tell folks to look for are, what are your high volume tasks? What is repetitive? What are you doing all the time? How much time does that take? And what’s the impact on your business? So figuring out what are the most acute pain points that you have that you can start to automate from. And most times, this is document review. This is contract review, research, email, drafting, template, drafting, intake. So right, there is 567, examples where you can get started, right? So that’s where I would say is probably the first place to look. Just to give you an example. So one use case that I see all the time when I’m talking to personal injury attorneys and their staff, it’s reviewing documents. So we know if there’s a personal injury case, there’s 1000s of records at a time, there’s police reports, there’s discovery documents, and every detail matters, especially if you get into a litigation setting, you need to be really, really strategic about how you’re processing information and digesting it. So if you think about AI, if you call Richie’s episode, we can deploy agents to look through these topics, look through these documents. So identifying, what are the red flags, what are our green flags? So where do we need to spend time strategizing, where’s the other team going to go and look to try to poke holes in our argument and automating that process through? So that’s just one example. Document review is the easiest way to get started. Yeah. And

Robert Hanna  3:20  

again, thank you for giving such a clear example for folks to follow. Sounds great. And on paper, it absolutely makes so much sense, but I can imagine you come across a few common barriers to this. So is that regarding data, is it the culture of a law firm? Is it just generally trusting the AI? So talk us through some of the common barriers you see, and how can firms overcome them more effectively? So

Andrew Light  3:43  

those are a number of the barriers that you see. Number one, it’s access to data and data security, so figuring out where’s all of our data stored and where can we put it. So if you look at open source versus closed source tools, there are lots of restrictions, especially when we talk about HIPAA, with what we can put into some of these platforms and then trusting, right? So I think Microsoft actually nailed it when they named their AI copilot and not autopilot. And that’s important, right? So trust and review is what I always say. You want to make sure that the output is good. You trust it, but you’re always reviewing it. And we’ve seen some examples in the past of folks that did a review and didn’t end up so great for them. So always trusting, always reviewing, and then training. So these tools are out there. Everyone’s using them, chat, GPT, notebook, LM, which I’ll talk about in a second. Everyone’s using them, but we need to figure out what the defined process is of the firm if we’re using open source, understanding what are the restrictions of open source so we not put ourselves up to any liability, and if it’s closed source platform, making sure we’re really training, because we’re not, to your point, we’re not reinventing our firm. We’re rewiring it, and everyone needs to make sure that we understand how we’re doing that. So even just a simple lunch and learn, or an hour, two hours out of the day, every other week, every month, just to make sure everyone’s on the same page, that will really help you to implement. These tools and be effective,

Robert Hanna  5:01  

yeah, and that’s the key word, isn’t it, to try and be as effective as possible. And that continuously learning. And I love your point around copilot, and it’s too Rishis point that we said in the first episode of this around collaboration, right? And that’s what you’re doing. You’re trying to collaborate with bringing all of this technology together to be more productive, more efficient, all of that good stuff. Are you what you gave some examples earlier on, sort of personal injury. You just want to go a little bit deeper. Could you walk us through the medical chronology, and, I guess, demand letter example, and what’s changed, and why does it matter in this context?

Andrew Light  5:34  

Yeah, absolutely so. If we think about the two elements, the most common example of a personal injury case, it’s writing a demand letter and it’s getting a medical chronology. A lot of times those go hand in hand. So writing a demand letter, it really is a formula. And what I want to focus on is the intake and the input. So when we talk about agentic AI, the output can only be as good as the input. So where we want to make sure we’re doing a lot of our work is during that intake process, getting everything that we need. So we can provide the AI tools with everything it needs to write a demand letter for us, and because it’s formulaic, and like Rishi talked about in the last episode, we built an agent specifically to do that task. We can do that in seconds, minutes. It doesn’t have to be a 456, hour process. So then, if you think about the ROI of this, if you can do what took four hours before in 15 minutes, including your review. Because again, always review. If we can do that in 15 minutes, think about what you can do at that time. So it’s not just about the speed, but it’s unlocking the bandwidth that you didn’t even know that you had within the firm. And then what can you do at that time? You can take more cases, you can focus on litigation. You can do whatever that, whatever you want. You can get home earlier, get home with the kids, put them in, whatever you want to do. You have the time back. And that’s what’s important. As far as the medical chronologies goes, there’s, it’s the same kind of thing, right? So it’s all about the input. We have really concise, really dense documents, and everything’s detailed out. AI can help you to identify where can we increase settlement value? Are there any mentions of TV eyes or traumatic brain injuries? We know that’s going to help us get towards a policy limit. We would break a policy limit, right? And then from there, we’re in a good spot. So it’s identifying what may be missed through the human review process, which is some some folks don’t want to believe it actually a higher rate of inaccuracy than technology. And when you pair the two together, it’s really powerful. So you have a high a highly accurate AI platform, AI workflow, AI agent, pairing that with a trained attorney, paralegal, law clerk, whatever it is those two, those two together can get you to places you never thought you could take a case super

Robert Hanna  7:41  

powerful. And again, just shows the the availability, and I guess, the the opportunity with all of this, if you choose to embrace because I always talk a lot about Tech for Good, and this is a great example of that. But we also talk a lot about disruption, and again, that can get people worried, concern lead to inaction, as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, suggesting around rewiring your firm rather than reinventing so what does that look like in practice? Just go a little bit deeper,

Unknown Speaker  8:12  

in terms of rewiring,

Robert Hanna  8:13  

yeah, in terms of, you know, if we’re saying, Look, you don’t need to kind of completely disrupt your whole law firm here, you just need to look at it from a rewiring perspective. What are some of the things you would say, or some practical steps people could look at?

Andrew Light  8:24  

Yeah, it’s taking a step back and looking at your processes totally objectively and saying, okay, where could I be better, and where can I use technology to fill in the gaps? So when I was talking before about document review, I was talking about case review, contract review, it’s figuring out where are we spending absorbent amounts of time on tasks that either don’t lead to a higher settlement value, that don’t lead to a billable hour, that don’t lead to a new client, and then auditing those processes out? So it’s making sure that we understand what our workflow is right now and how we’ve trained our folks to do the tasks that they’re responsible for doing. And if we can take a step back, look at what that is and identify, Okay, we can go faster here, here and here, even just with one simple thing, go to chat GPT, to review a police report, any non medical record, any anything that’s public information. Put that to chat GPT, put that into notebook, LM, and see how you can go quicker. Yeah, and

Robert Hanna  9:18  

that’s the thing, isn’t it, you can really enhance your your speed, your efficiency, and you can pass on all of those benefits, to to clients, to your to your staff, like you say, maybe they might be able to get home to actually see their children, put them to bed, all these little things that can improve workplace culture as well. Okay, before we we close, we’ve focused a lot around this series so far, the agentic AI in terms of the internal operations and improving things. But, you know, agentic AI can do more. Can’t it? So it can, you know, serve, it can sell. It can potentially help retain existing clients, attract new clients. Do you want to talk a little bit more about how agentic AI could be used in those settings? We’ve established

Andrew Light  9:54  

a connection with folks before. We have clients. We’ve done a good job for it. We want to keep them and re engage them, get. Law is a really, really heavily referral driven business, so that’s one element when we talk about marketing, that’s important to remember as well. So making sure that we’re setting expectations, that’s one thing. So I actually was talking to a family attorney that we worked with the other day, and they were talking about how they use AI to set expectations, because especially in his area, love, emotions are high. Feelings are really, really heavy, so managing that becomes difficult. But if you can use AI in his example, look at what this person’s profile was, or find a case that they’ve worked on previously by relying on their internal knowledge base and figuring out, okay, here’s what we can expect for a timeline, here’s what we can expect. Here’s what we can expect that helps that person that’s in a sensitive, insensitive state to feel better about it, and you don’t run into someone that’s, you know, not having a good experience with you. So that’s one case in family law. Another one that I think is big in the personal injury and mass tort space is personal injury firms have 1000s of medical records for all their clients. Right when a new mass tort case comes out, let’s say it’s a prescription drug, for example, AI can help you to mine your database to identify folks that may qualify. So you’ve done a good job for them. They know you, they trust you, they love you, and now you can reach out to them and say, Hey, you might benefit from this. It’s something to consider. We can help you do that. So you’re continuing in what is more of a transactional type of law, personal injury, a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times, you can continue to build that relationship, which will build referrals, which will build new cases, which you now have the time to take because you’ve been automating with AI,

Robert Hanna  11:35  

yeah, great example. And again, What’s there not to love about this? And you know, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation today, Andrew, it’s been super rich. And if our listeners want to follow you, or indeed, learn more about fast outcomes, where can they go to find out more? Feel free to share any websites, any social media handles. We’ll also share them as episode for you too.

Andrew Light  11:53  

Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. Andrew light on LinkedIn. Rishi, I believe, said last time, but faster outcomes.com, is our website, or catch me travel in the country. I give talks like this all the time. Lot of CLE talks across Colorado, across North Dakota. So I’m everywhere. Come find me. Would love to meet everybody, but I really appreciate you having me on today. Rob,

Robert Hanna  12:13  

it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining us, and thank you to you listeners for tuning in to our second episode of the future proof lore, faster, smarter, better, mini series. Remember, it’s not about disruption, it’s about Smart Evolution. Start small, think big, and let AI help you. Work better, not harder. For now, over and out.