AI is already changing how lawyers work — ready or not
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and even Grok are growing in popularity among the local legal community.
While no attorney I know is relying on these AI tools to replace the actual services they perform for their clients, they are leaning more into these tools to simply help get their jobs done faster and to improve both their firm’s efficiency and client affordability. How?
Derek Martin, a co-founder and attorney at Driver Defense Team, a firm based in Stone Park, says his office uses AI heavily in the discovery process.
“For example, when we represent a client who was arrested, we have the video evidence (policy body-worn camera, dash camera, etc.) transcribed and organized by AI,” he said. “It helps to summarize timelines and identify key moments for attorney review and allows our lawyers to spend less time searching and more time thinking about case facts and strategy.”
Andrew Stoltmann, a securities investment fraud attorney in Hoffman Estates agrees and says discovery is probably the most important use of AI in his firm. He uses his AI assistant to look for patterns, trends, and specific documents. And he’s seeing significant time savings.
“AI has probably cut down legal research time from 20 hours a month down to about one hour a month,” he said. “It has been nothing short of amazing.”
While discovery and document searching is important, AI phone service systems — as well as offerings from well-known software services that cater to the legal industry — are also being used to handle incoming calls and help clients get answers faster.
Raiford Dalton Palmer, a divorce attorney based in Naperville, is implementing a new AI application called Lexidesk for client intake to help handle new client phone calls and text messages when the firm’s human specialists aren’t available. Besides using the teams’ version of ChatGPT to share conversations and research across the firm, he says he’s implemented Harvey.ai to assist with drafting, research, analysis, and document review, and is starting to work with Lexis Protégé to help with guided workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and provide a secure, private environment for handling sensitive firm data.
“The tools are developing so quickly that it is difficult to stay on top of all the new offerings and to know which are best for our purposes,” he said.
While appreciative of its cost savings, most attorneys I know are also wary of AI’s risks, particularly to their profession. Stories have become popular in the media of instances where attorneys rely too much on the results generated by their AI chatbot, only to become victim (and even face sanctions) because their AI tool was hallucinating. Today’s AI tools are helpful, but they’re certainly not 100% reliable and must always be checked.
“I’ve read about lawyers, even some judges who come under scrutiny for possibly using AI and not sufficiently investigating the results of the AI prompt — and citing those in legal documents without doing the proper verification,” said Keith Shindler, a personal injury attorney in Schaumburg. “That’s not anything I want to be mixed up in.”
Shindler said he makes sure to verify whatever information AI delivers before citing it in pleadings, specifically when it comes to case law.
“One of the biggest challenges is protecting clients’ personal information and not citing hallucinated case law,” he said.
George Bellas, an attorney and partner at Park Ridge’s Bellas & Wachowski, also knows the risks. As first chair of the Illinois State Bar Association’s AI Committee and after serving on the Illinois Supreme Court’s Commission on AI, Bellas says his firm leans heavily on AI applications and agents to do research, draft memoranda, offer new options for solutions to office procedures, get second opinions on actions for clients, assist in the preparation of depositions, as well as summarizing collections of documents and creating timelines for analysis.
However, he says it will be a continuous challenge for lawyers to manage the risks of this new technology and to figure out the right use of AI for their specific practice.
“My concern is that it will stifle creativity in lawyers and they will rely on the stock answers provided by AI agents,” he said. “The profession will contract as lawyers employ AI in their practices and many jobs will be lost. There are many new ethical issues which are coming to the surface and the profession must adapt to the issues facing us in the use of AI.”
Regardless of the risks, the future of AI technology in the legal field seems unlimited. Deployed properly it will be used to provide a higher level of service at a more affordable price and it will certainly increase the productivity of attorneys and their staff.
“We see AI becoming part of our structured, multipass legal review process,” said Martin. “When done successfully, it will help our attorneys sculpt better arguments faster while also preserving human judgment where it matters most. The goal will be to make it a first-pass assistant, not a final authority or decision-maker.”
• Gene Marks is a CPA who owns and operates The Marks Group PC, experts in customer relationship management technologies.