Using emerging AI tech to prompt your future

Leading tools and real-world case studies

2025 August

The legal profession is undergoing a seismic shift. For plaintiff injury lawyers, artificial intelligence (AI) and legal technology have moved from optional curiosities to essential tools that drive efficiency, improve accuracy, and enhance client outcomes. Yet many lawyers remain hesitant, unsure whether these technologies are worth the investment, or are concerned about ethical risks and complexity.

If you are still on the sidelines, it’s time to reconsider. According to the most recent American Bar Association (ABA) Legal Technology Survey Report, in 2024, 30% of respondents reported using AI technology, marking a 19% increase from 2023. American culture and the legal profession seem to be in alignment that AI is a present-day and future necessity for any business, especially lawyers and firms.

This article explores why AI and legal tech are indispensable, compares leading tools, and shares real-world case studies demonstrating their transformative impact.

The strategic imperative: Why your firm needs AI now

Plaintiff firms juggle dozens or hundreds of cases, each with voluminous medical records, discovery demands, and deadlines. The cost of litigation continues to rise, while margins tighten. In this environment, operational efficiency is a survival strategy.

AI-powered tools help firms:

Accelerate case intake and filing.

Automate tedious discovery and document review.

Generate data-driven demand letters and valuations.

Enhance trial preparation and jury analysis.

Improve client communication and intake conversion.

Firms that adopt AI report faster workflows, higher settlement values, and reduced burnout. Those who resist risk falling behind competitors who leverage technology to deliver better, faster, and more cost-effective representation.

Practical applications: Demand letters

Demand letters are the lifeblood of plaintiff practice, but also an area that is notoriously time consuming. Two standout tools have emerged to relieve some of the burden, EvenUp and DemandsAI®. These AI-powered platforms can generate settlement-ready demand letters in under a minute. These tools:

Parse medical records and other evidence.

Calculate damages, including pain and suffering, loss of earnings, and future care.

Organize facts and citations for maximum impact.

Flag missing records or prior injuries.

Estimate case value based on real- world outcomes and jurisdictional trends.

EvenUp goes a step further by combining AI with expert human review, ensuring that demand letters are not only fast, but fact-rich and persuasive. Its “Case Companion” feature instantly extracts and organizes key facts across a plaintiff’s medical file, saving paralegals and attorneys hours of tedious work.

According to its client testimonials, EvenUp reduced demand letter preparation time from six hours to under one hour per case for a mid-sized California plaintiff firm. The firm reported a 20% increase in settlement values due to more comprehensive, data-driven demands. Meanwhile, a smaller firm using DemandsAI® saw a 50% reduction in time spent on initial demands, enabling attorneys to focus more on client strategy.

Discovery and document management

Discovery is often the most laborious phase of litigation. Even those who enjoy discovery (and there are plenty) will admit it can be a drain on time, effort and capital. AI tools can revolutionize this critical step in any case by reshaping how attorneys manage and analyze documents. ClearBrief, for example, transforms how attorneys handle drafting, motion practice, and document review. Here’s what this Microsoft Word plugin brings to the table:

Contextual search: Go beyond exact-match searching. Type in a keyword like “infidelity,” and ClearBrief will surface related language such as “cheating” or “unfaithful.”

Hyperlinked timelines: Automatically pulls every date from a transcript and builds a clickable chronology, directly linked to source material.

Fact-checking: Verifies legal citations in your documents (or opposing counsel’s), flags outdated or misapplied law, and suggests supporting authority.

Deposition exhibit builder: Inserts transcript portions with citations into your Word doc and generates exhibits with a single click.

Table of authorities: Creates fully formatted, hyperlinked TOAs in seconds, saving hours of manual work.

Evidence review: Flags inadmissible evidence such as hearsay or speculation in opposing briefs.

Reusable language: Upload prior filings and ClearBrief will suggest reusable language, improving consistency and speeding up drafting.

Other tools, like Adobe Acrobat Pro, include AI-assisted redaction, optical character recognition (OCR), and clause recognition, making PDF workflows faster and safer.

Written discovery and client portals

AI can now automate written discovery, generate objections with a click, and allow clients to respond to interrogatories and requests at their convenience via secure portals. This not only reduces attorney workload but also empowers clients to participate more actively in their cases.

AI in legal research and document analysis

Modern legal research platforms are leveraging AI to search case law, statutes, and regulations with unprecedented speed and accuracy. For example:

Lexis+ AI (Protégé): Integrates your firm’s internal documents with Lexis’s vast library to create tailored legal drafts, summarize large case files, and organize all in one place.

Westlaw Precision + CoCounsel: Excels at jurisdictional surveys, detecting mischaracterizations in briefs, and multi-jurisdiction research.

AI-assisted document analysis tools sift through voluminous records, flag inconsistencies, and extract key facts. They help uncover the proverbial “needle in a haystack” and ensure that critical details aren’t missed.

Jury selection and trial preparation

Even the art of trial preparation – which has inspired several legal trailblazers to write books and base their entire reputations around – has been transformed by AI.

Platforms like JurySimulator create AI-generated mock jurors based on local demographics and psychographics. These “Persona Bots” provide feedback on case theories, witness credibility, and argument effectiveness – offering invaluable insights at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional focus groups. Though nothing can beat an in-person mock trial, this can save five figures in preparatory costs.

And during trial, these tools can adapt to reflect the seated jury’s profile, acting as a “shadow jury” to help assess the evolving case presentation in real time.

ClearBrief’s hyperlinked courtesy copies are a great resource during trial preparation by generating content that meets evolving court filing requirements and ensures judges can navigate key evidence effortlessly.

Built-in AI tools: Everyday efficiencies

Not every tool needs to be a standalone platform. Many of the programs you already use, like Word and Outlook, now include machine-learning features that streamline writing, scheduling, and even email drafting. Isn’t it wonderful how Word has evolved beyond spell check? It immediately raises grammatical issues and even shows you the locations of repeated words so you can just click and update or delete.

These built-in tools can add up to significant time savings across your team and prevent embarrassing mistakes from being seen by judges, opposing counsel or clients.

Client intake and communication

Increasing caseloads without sacrificing client service is a perennial challenge. AI-powered intake solutions help:

Smith.ai offers 24/7 virtual receptionists and chatbots that qualify leads and book consultations

AI-enhanced customer relationship management (CRM) automates follow-ups, predicts client needs, and centralizes communications

Secure client portals enable real-time document sharing and status updates

A plaintiff firm integrated Smith.ai and saw a 25% increase in qualified leads and a 15% boost in case conversion rates. The CRM’s predictive analytics reportedly helped attorneys prioritize cases with the highest settlement potential, improving firm profitability.

Ethical and security considerations: Practicing responsible AI

One of the first questions asked is: How ethical is it to use AI, and to what extent? After all, a virtual assistant is performing tasks for which you may be billing. Furthermore, as with any emerging technology, there are always risks of inaccuracy, or worse, a breach. The ABA understood these concerns but saw the signs that AI – like the internet and sliced bread – would be here to stay. They had the foresight in 2023 to issue Resolution 604, which highlights the need for AI to remain under human control and oversight at all times. It stresses that organizations and individuals should be held accountable for any harm resulting from AI, unless they have taken reasonable steps to reduce risks. Most importantly, it provided a framework for ethical AI adoption.

Verification: Always review AI-generated content to prevent hallucinations or inaccuracies.

Transparency: Disclose AI use to clients and explain benefits and limitations.

Security: Use tools with enterprise- grade encryption and secure data storage.

Augmentation: AI should support, not replace, attorney judgment.

The resolution also encourages lawmakers at all levels to integrate these principles into AI-related laws and standards. In essence, ABA Resolution 604 underscores the importance of accountability, transparency, and human supervision in the development and use of AI technologies. It is also worth noting that your state bar’s guidance might differ from the ABA in some respects.

California’s guidance is more detailed and prescriptive in several areas, and expects its lawyers to use it as a “guiding principle,” instead of a “best practice.” For example, Duty of Confidentiality Bus. & Prof. Code section 6068, subd. (e), Rule 1.6 and Rule 1.8.2. expressly state:

A lawyer must not input any confidential information of the client into any generative AI solution that lacks adequate confidentiality and security protections. A lawyer must anonymize client information and avoid entering details that can be used to identify the client.

And seemingly taking a cue from the scandalous “ChatGPT case” in New York that we’ll explore momentarily, the California State Bar’s Duties of Competence and Diligence rules state:

Overreliance on AI tools is inconsistent with the active practice of law and application of trained judgment by the lawyer. AI-generated outputs … should be critically analyzed for accuracy and bias, supplemented, and improved, if necessary. A lawyer must critically review, validate, and correct both the input and the output of generative AI to ensure the content accurately reflects and supports the interests and priorities of the client in the matter at hand, including as part of advocacy for the client. The duty of competence requires more than the mere detection and elimination of false AI-generated results.

Penalties are those already established for breaches of the California Rules of Professional Conduct. They are not unique to AI, but fully applicable to its misuse. Plaintiffs’ firms should look to the ABA and their state bars to establish clear policies, conduct training, and select vendors committed to privacy and compliance.

Accuracy does ‘Mata’: A recent cautionary tale

The concepts of verification and augmentation deserve extra focus. Many in the profession know of the infamous “ChatGPT case” from 2023, Mata v. Avianca, Inc. in the Southern District of New York. It made headlines because a lawyer used ChatGPT to draft a legal brief that cited several completely fabricated, nonexistent case citations.

The cases made up by ChatGPT are what’s known in the AI sphere as “hallucinations.” The opposing counsel and judge couldn’t find the cited cases in any legal database. The court demanded an explanation, leading the lawyer to shamefully admit he had relied on ChatGPT and even asked it to confirm the cases were real – to which it (incorrectly) insisted they were.

The judge sanctioned the lawyer and his firm, calling it a cautionary tale for AI use in legal practice. This case sparked major discussion about responsible AI use in law, hallucinations, and the importance of fact-checking AI outputs. And as noted above, bar associations nationwide took note and implemented strong policies. Two years have passed and ChatGPT has learned from its mistakes as well, but this serves as a pivotal cautionary tale for lawyers to be thorough. There were unforeseen benefits as well, as it also indirectly boosted interest in tools like Clearbrief, which verify facts and citations against actual source documents, helping to avoid exactly this kind of problem.

The future is here: Will you lead or follow?

Plaintiff-side law firms don’t just practice law – they carry risk, invest in people, and bet on outcomes that can take years to realize. That means we have to be smart about how we operate. The work must get done, the quality must remain high, and yet the margins are constantly squeezed by the ever-increasing cost of litigation.

The data is clear: plaintiff firms embracing AI and legal technology gain measurable advantages in speed, accuracy, client satisfaction, and financial performance. It’s likely that the ABA will note yet another year-over-year increase among members’ adoption for their 2025 Legal Technology Survey Report.

Thinking of software and tech becoming more like humans isn’t the right lens through which to view the progression. On a purely cognitive level, it’s more like computers and programs co-evolve with humans, sort of like dogs, who are far more adaptive today than 100 years ago. This concept of macro-symbiosis, an interconnectedness with machines, could ultimately free lawyers to focus on the impactful advocacy that strengthens results in court or at the negotiating table.

Conversely, firms that resist adapting new technology risk falling behind in a rapidly evolving market where clients demand efficiency and transparency. The question is no longer if AI will change your practice, but how quickly you will adopt it responsibly, as per ABA and state bar guidance. The future of civil law is being written today. The time to lead the charge is now.