AI adoption: steer the vehicle, don't wait for a self-driving car
Billing in 0.1-hour units forces a hard truth: every six minutes counts the same, but not every task creates the same client value. Clients pay for judgment. The pressure is to spend less time on assembly and more on analysis.
AI helps make that shift. Treat it like a vehicle you drive. It accelerates your work when you steer with intent, set the route, and keep your hands on the wheel.
The efficiency imperative
The six-minute clock doesn't care whether you are extracting dates or refining a legal theory. Your client does. Value lives in the outcome, not the stopwatch.
AI lets you move time from low-leverage tasks to the decisions that change results. That's the win: more judgment per hour.
Augmented capability, not replacement
Think in "buckets of competency": research, drafting, advocacy, communication, judgment. Law is a multidimensional board game. The real skill is knowing what is relevant and why.
Traditional tools help you collect information. Generative AI helps you synthesize it, test ideas, and see patterns sooner. You still decide what stands up in court or across the table.
Practice management: where AI pays off quickly
I used to split drafting into two halves: the first 80% (assemble facts and structure) and the last 20% (refine and polish). AI compresses both. It extracts, organizes, and checks, then offers clean variants for tone and clarity.
The daily gains compound. Here are repeatable wins you can implement now:
- Summarize affidavits with paragraph references for quick cross-referencing.
- Extract dates and entities to build reliable timelines.
- Compare clauses across versions and flag differences worth reviewing.
- Reorganize arguments into factum outlines to tighten the through-line.
- Generate neutral case summaries or a first-pass notice of motion for you to refine.
None of this replaces review. It clears the underbrush so you can spend time where judgment matters.
How to steer: a simple method
- Brief: State the role, goal, audience, constraints, and output format. Provide facts and preferred structure upfront.
- Bound: Set scope and limits. Cite the source materials the model must stick to. Ban external sources if accuracy is critical.
- Probe: Ask the model to list assumptions and unknowns before drafting. Close the gaps, then proceed.
- Verify: Spot-check every factual claim and citation. "Garbage in, garbage out" still applies.
- Log: Save effective prompts and outputs to a playbook so the next matter starts faster.
Risk, ethics, and controls
AI tools predict text. That means fluent answers can still be wrong or miss nuance. Overconfidence is the failure mode. Build verification into your process and treat outputs as drafts, not conclusions.
Confidentiality needs the same discipline you applied to cloud adoption. Use enterprise deployments with data controls, access logs, and settings that prevent training on client inputs. Document your policy and train your team.
For professional duties, review tech competence guidance and risk standards that map to legal work:
What changes in your day-to-day
Your writing rhythm improves. Instead of wrestling with phrasing for hours, you iterate in minutes and spend your energy on what must be said, not how to say it.
You move faster through documents without skipping scrutiny. Extraction, comparison, and consistency checks become background processes. Your foreground becomes strategy, leverage, and narrative.
Guardrails that keep you sharp
- Never cite cases, statutes, or authorities without checking primary sources.
- Keep a red/amber/green matrix for matters where AI is prohibited, restricted, or allowed with controls.
- Use retrieval from your own file set for sensitive work; ban open web pulls in those workflows.
- Make peer review a default on any filing touched by AI, even if brief.
- Track time saved per task and reinvest it into strategy memos, witness prep, and negotiation planning.
Looking ahead
AI doesn't replace judgment; it multiplies your capacity to exercise it. The mountain of work is still there. The climb is faster, and the view is clearer.
If you drive it with care-clear briefs, tight bounds, relentless verification-you get more client value per six minutes. That is the edge.
Get started this week
- Pick three cases and apply AI to timelines, clause comparisons, and affidavit summaries.
- Build a prompt library with your firm's voice, templates, and preferred structures.
- Write a one-page policy: tools allowed, data controls, review steps, and citation rules.
- Schedule a 60-minute team session to review wins, misses, and updated guardrails.
- Level up skills with focused training: AI courses by job.
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