How to Use AI in your Law Firm

hey, if you are trying to figure out how to use AI inside of your law firm to build efficiencies or to gain leverage or whatever I've shot a quick down and dirty video.

I go broad on this and then I'm gonna go deep on some of these topics.

But if you are interested in me going deep on some of these topics and breaking down all these tools for you, I, I'm happy to do that and help you understand how you can better use them.

 

During my recent conversations with the partners, club captains in my private captain text thread, I noticed that many of the captains are utilizing ai artificial intelligence for many things in their firm. And specifically speaking, they use it for marketing as we have built out our full.

Marketing team. We too use AI on a regular basis. I thought what I would do is run through a couple of items for you. So first, to give you what the current state of the game is. And again, this is going to change. I'm writing this six weeks in advance of when you're receiving it.

And it's probably changed by then. It's changing so quickly, but it doesn't mean it's not relevant information. It just means you're gonna have to find the newest and best thing. So just know that AI is changing regularly. That what's gonna be constant with AI is going to be changed. The whole purpose of this is it learns and it makes things better, and new softwares come out all the time.

There. There probably will not be a dominant AI company that owns any particular platform ever, simply because of the nature of the way that this whole thing works. So I want you to be software and platform agnostic and be careful about getting trapped into building something into proprietary funnel or the lockdown system that you can't get out of.

And then if you go to another system, you're gonna have to rebuild everything. Try your best to get things that allow you to export it into separate files so you don't feel like you're locked down. First thing I wanna do is talk about, the fact that there are. AI tools out there. And so let's just break into this a little bit.

Whether you're scared to death of AI and you think that, sentient learning is coming and the terminator is real or whatever or you're enthused about a ai and you're wondering to figure out how to use it in your firm, but you just never had any clear direction.

I, I don't know how to help you in the former argument. That's a topic for another discussion. There's plenty of podcasts about that you can go listen to, but I'd like to pay attention to the latter. So there are some ways I. So if I think about this through the lens of where you're at.

If you're a level one attorney, a level two attorney, a level three attorney, or a level four attorney, you're gonna use these tools differently. So level one, remember, you're the attorney, you're doing all the work, you have a couple of reports to you, and everything passes through you, and you become the bottleneck.

AI allows you to. Do things quicker that used to take you more time and allows you to have your assistant do things for you because AI frees you up from worrying about a bunch of mistakes that are typically made, especially once you train the ai. If you're the level two attorney and you're the manager and you're in what we call law firm ownership hell one of the ways in order for you to get

to level three is for you to be able to hire people to replace you. And one of the ways to do that is to make sure you're profitable. And one of the ways to make sure you're profitable is to leverage AI to reduce your need for employees. And you can do that. So you can leverage AI to start to replace some of the jobs that are being done by other people and save labor costs.

Level three ownership as a CEO level, now what you're gonna do is you're gonna use AI to allow your teammates to become more efficient, which means they'll be able to get more work done in each position, which will allow you to dump more business on top of your. Existing team without them feeling too stressed because you've given them new tools to be able to do their jobs whether that's in the marketing department, client service department, or workflow department.

So this is a really important functionality for you. If you're the level four attorney and you're in the investor level, you're just licensing your CEO to invest in AI to stay ahead of the game to figure out how to best utilize it in your firm. While of course watching out to make sure you're within bar guidelines and things like that.

'cause there's some things you may or may not be able to do based on your Bar Association. So everything I'm gonna talk about. Today is you need to pass this through the filter of your bar association to make sure it's okay for you to do it, especially if it's client facing or marketing or what have you.

The first way that I use AI just to be clear, is like client communication. I've written many, tens of thousands of words every single month for 15 years. And so I'm a reasonable writer. I write like I talk, and so my English teacher would tell me they hate the way that I write.

If I have an answer for a client, I'm gonna write my opinion and I'm gonna put it through chat, GPT and have chat GPT clean it up. And I have it, not put the emojis in there or anything, so it doesn't look like it's ai.

But basically it's my words and my opinion. But put together in a structured way. And then of course I have to read it to make sure it got it right. But that just helps me put out a cleaner product as an to answers to my clients. So for you, you could have your client success team actually build start to answer clients by the, with use of AI to make sure that they're getting grammar right and spelling and they're not having to retype the same thing over and over again, and you can start to create templates.

The other thing you can do con conversely with this through client communication is there are tools that allow you to actually build a wiki, like a W Wikipedia, so like an internal Wikipedia so that you'll be able to build a library of these frequently asked questions. And then when your staff doesn't know the answer to something, they'll be able to go to this library and get their questions answered.

You can get as advances, putting videos on there and audios on there, and transcripts on there and whatever. And it's gonna help your staff have a place to go so you can get your the knowledge out of your brain and into this wiki, and you'll reduce the brain suck on you every single day.

Other practical ways of using AI that I use it every day is when we're writing ads for Facebook or any type of ads that we're creating. We're using AI to help us craft those ads and craft headlines. And a little trick here is, for years. For years, one of the hardest things for law firms to do was to find a copywriter to write for them, write direct mail pieces, write for them, write Facebook ads for them or whatever.

And in order to hire the Dan Kennedys of the world or the Gary Halbert, Gary's dead. I. Sorry, Gary's dead, so he's not gonna help you. Or Barry Vega or John Carlton or whatever. Fill in the blank of the copywriters of the world Ogilvy. Some of these favorite copywriters.

You can tell. Chat, GPT. To write in their style. So you could say, give me a direct mail piece to a family law with this issue, with this, they've been served and they need to act. And I'm gonna send 'em a direct mail piece and I want you to write it using Dan Kennedy's style or using Ogilvy's style or using Gary Halbert's style.

It just means you no longer have to go pay, thousands of dollars for copywriters anymore. It's not perfect. You still have to have a basis of knowledge, but boy, it'll do great work for you.

And the more information you give chat GPT, the better information it gives you back so you can actually load up support documents or past information or information about client stories so that so that he, testimonials and things like that. So we would actually know what is how to properly craft messages for you.

The other thing I would say is you can write newsletters. So if you're thinking about doing an e-newsletter or a printed newsletter, whether it is a one pager or a 20 pager like we put out you can have it help you write articles. Candidly, the AI helped us write this article today. I gave it the basis.

Amanda told it to write it in my voice. We've trained it to write in my voice. Amanda then took it and. Used her copywriter expertise to make it better. And then we gave it to me for final approval. But all I had to do is now speak it and I no longer have to have, a copywriter transcribe it and do everything else we used to have to do.

It's really seamless and so you can have it craft newsletter articles for you that are written very well. And again, you can either write it in your voice or you can have it, write it in some other copywriter's voice that you really like. This is the same for print articles that you would put in local magazines or newspapers.

Yes, they still have those things out there, and some of those are the best places for building credibility in the community. You can have it create images for you, and so it'll literally create an image from scratch. If you've not done this, it's a lot of fun to play with. You can have it create music for you.

Jeff Kelly loves to create music and so he'll, he loves music and he's very musical, and he will create slogans and jingles and things of that nature using the AI tools that are available to him from scratch by just giving it an idea and it will make it for him. You can have it write your video script.

So if you're gonna do a video and you're going to create that video, you can have it. Write the video and tell you like what tone to use, how to lean in how to sit back, how to talk soft. How to talk loud. When to raise your voice, when to make a point, you know, and it'll say what your background should look like.

It'll create you a literal video script that if you wanted to, you could put in a teleprompter and you could read right from it. And create a wonderful video from that tool. And if you're doing content, organic content online, it's a great tool for you to be able to use, especially if you're new at this.

You can actually have AI create a talking head of you. And that was clunky six months ago. But now I've seen a couple of market in marketing agencies or advertising agencies for law firms actually offering that as a service. Our good friend, james Publishing, Kara Pryor they are offering that service now.

I highly recommend you go check them out. And they've been a sponsor in our world for a long time. She's using AI as a tool to create talking heads for you to have, your own version of yourself out there.

Sending messages out without you having to record videos and it's feeling more and more real every day. Gary V, he's a big social media guy, if you don't know. He estimates that at some point in the future there will be more AI influencers, lawyers or business owners that are out there talking about their businesses pitching the benefit of their services or products.

Then there actually are humans on the earth. Interesting concept. , You're gonna want to do this. It's not if you do it, it's when you do it, it's gonna be necessary. 'cause people are gonna look for this. Now the other thing you could do is you can have AI make phone calls for you.

Charles Puka is working with cogent right now to actually make outbound calls to unconverted leads. Answer after evening calls instead of the answering service. So he is cut his costs on some answering service things as well as you've made outbound. He's making outbound calls, as I said it's not perfect by any means, but boy oh boy, is it close.

And again, I recommend you go get Hear from Cogent and talk to Robert Stanley and his team about what they're doing there. And then you can take data. So marketing, is the confluence of of advertising and sales, and you could put those two things together. And you can get, you're gonna get the data out of it.

So you're, your cost per lead and your cost per your sales machine is gonna give you your cost to acquire a client, your cac, and you're gonna get your LTV and you could put all that data in a spreadsheet and feed you back the information that you want based on that data, and it will digest it instantly and.

And it just does math very well. And so it'll be able to give you, tell you trends, it'll be able to tell you what you should pay attention to and your return on investments and all that stuff.

You can also use AI. To manage your emails. You can use AI to manage workflow, you can use AI to do like assistant like tools for you, and there are just some incredible tools for you to be able to use to make your life easier. So again, if you're a level one attorney, if you're a level two attorney, a level three attorney, or a level four attorney, you're gonna wanna figure out how to best use this.

For you and or your team so you can start to build efficiencies. Most of you that listen to this are usually in the level one or level two attorney level. You're either keep it small, keep it all, or you're in law firm ownership hell. And so AI can become quickly a very good friend of yours, but you do need somebody in your office that's gonna head this up, somebody who's good with technology and.

And isn't afraid of it anyway and is willing to learn and put the time in. 'cause this stuff takes a minute or two to play with and there's gonna be a commitment level to get this done. And as much as I, as we use ai, I will tell you there's so much of it we don't use. And I've seen some advice from thought leaders out there to go lock yourself in a room for six months and just play with AI until you perfect it.

And I get that mentality the. Problem is, most of you, including me, don't have the ability to go lock ourselves in a room for six months 'cause we've got businesses to run. Now you can certainly do it for a week or you can even do it for a month, but I'm not suggesting that I am suggesting try one of them and just pick one of the things that I just said or any of the, one of the things that you see on that chart that we gave you and just start there.

Most of these things are free. Some of them have paid models. And they're usually very inexpensive. You can pay for premium stuff as well, but start with either the free version or a low end paid model and just try it and get it started in your practice on developing both advertising material as well as sales material.

It could also develop training. So here's an interesting little tip bonus. Did you know that you could go into AI and we want, we tell law firms that when they hire us to help them train their sales staff, that, that's great. The what we do is good, but it's a supplement to what should happen at home.

It's like a, an educate formal education for a kid. Like the teacher teaches 'em so much during the day, but. It's their homework and the work they do with their parents where really a lot of the stuff sinks in. And so you can actually use ai, to role play with you in a sales call scenario.

And you could feed it your script and you could tell it to role play with you. And my gosh, it will do that and help your sales reps get better and it'll give you different scenarios and different situations and tell you whether you did a good job. Overcoming it or not. My suggestion to you is to roll up your sleeves, start small, get started.

Let's use artificial intelligence. I think what I'll do is I'll start to go deeper on some of these things. If you found this helpful, put it in the comments below and let us know that, if you found this kind of overview helpful. I'll also give you the image of. Of all the chat of all the ais that are currently available.

Again, if you're watching this today, it's relevant. If you're watching this, 2, 3, 4, 5 months from now or reading about this in our newsletter, you know it, it may very well, some of this might be outdated and you'll have to go look for the updated version. That's okay. It's easily accessible, and incidentally, AI will help you go out there and find it.

But just get started. Pick one thing and if you found it helpful, let us know and I'll be happy to I'll be happy to share more about this in the future.

 

Look, if you wanna learn more about just how to enhance the systems in your firm, and whether it's AI or it's just frameworks to build these systems and you'd like support you could go to the law firm secrets.com and you could, the link is below and you could visit us there and schedule a 10 minute call and see if we're a fit.

And if we are, we can start that discussion.

If you enjoyed this section on ai, and again, you want me to go deeper on this topic and you want more information on any particular one, comment below or let us know. I. So that we can start to create additional content around this for you.

Happy to dive deep on these things. I know this is a broad overview, but hopefully it gave you some guidance as to where to turn for AI for law firms and how we're using it in our firm. Okay? We eat our own dog food around here. But go ahead and click on the and the share button and comment, and that helps us create more content for you.

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This is more of a broad scenario, so you can maybe choose one area that you wanna start in and maybe you can contact some of the vendors I mentioned.

I get nothing for it if you do. I talk about some of our clients that are using it as well as some of the vendors that are doing things, and so I, I highly recommend you just take a look at this. If you're curious about ai, you'll learn something about how we use it and about how our clients are using it as well.