Personal injury lawyers find 'massive opportunity' with AI
Recent months have brought an explosion of massive investments in artificial intelligence tools for personal injury lawyers.
In October, legal tech startup Eve, which created an AI platform to help plaintiffs lawyers streamline operations, announced it was valued at more than $1 billion after raising $103 million in its latest financing round.
EvenUp, another legal AI startup, also announced in October that it raised $150 million in funding. The company, which helps personal injury lawyers draft demand letters and automate other tasks, says it is now valued at more than $2 billion.
“Legal AI is no longer a side bet; it’s becoming the backbone of personal injury law,” Rami Karabibar, the CEO and co-founder of EvenUp, said at the time.
A report released this summer by professional business platform 8am supports this sentiment, showing 37% of personal injury lawyers use generative AI at work, compared to 31% of lawyers overall.
“There’s so much capital coming into the space because there’s a massive opportunity,” says personal injury lawyer Robert Simon. (Photo courtesy of Robert Simon)
“There’s so much capital coming into the space because there’s a massive opportunity,” says Robert Simon, the co-founder of the Simon Law Group, a personal injury firm with offices in Southern California.
Personal injury lawyers are motivated to use AI because they work on a contingency fee basis and “have to win to get paid,” Simon points out. Because of this arrangement, many are entrepreneurial by nature and look for ways to be more efficient.
Unlike BigLaw, where attorneys often need approval before testing new AI tools, personal injury lawyers can quickly decide which products to use in their firms, Simon states. “You have this group of lawyers who are very willing to adopt AI, and they’re not tied down by bureaucracy,” he says, adding that he can “meet with someone and incorporate their product tomorrow.”
“And if it doesn’t work, you pivot,” says Simon, who has his own legal tech experience as the co-founder of case referral platform Attorney Share and membership network Justice HQ.
Improving efficiency
AI helps solo attorneys and small firms build practices more affordably and faster than was previously possible, says Robert Hartigan, the founder of Lionhart Injury Law, who represents clients in Boston and Georgia.
“The old-school way of doing it was either you or a paralegal had to go through every record and basically create a summary of the treatment and the dates and the diagnosis,” says personal injury lawyer Robert Hartigan. (Photo by Amy Bucher)
Hartigan uses AI tools developed by Filevine, which provides cloud-based case management software to personal injury attorneys. One tool creates medical record chronologies from voluminous files “in a matter of minutes,” he says.
“The old-school way of doing it was either you or a paralegal had to go through every record and basically create a summary of the treatment and the dates and the diagnosis,” Hartigan says. “I still check everything, but it cuts down so much time.”
Like EvenUp and Eve, Filevine helps draft demand letters, which Hartigan says also saves him hours of work.
Jay Stefani, the managing partner of Levinson and Stefani in Chicago, sees similar benefits with Supio, another legal AI platform for personal injury firms. Along with summarizing medical records and drafting demand letters, Stefani uses it to create responses to interrogatories, which drastically improves efficiency, he says.
“We can get them from the defendant, run them through Supio, get them pre-answered, and get a really impressive draft that we can turn around and get to our client,” says Stefani, adding that the process now takes about a week instead of a month.
Using AI to respond to interrogatories also benefits clients, who bear the burden of some administrative tasks, Stefani says.
“I would not be comfortable as a lawyer putting clients’ sensitive information” into even paid versions of open-source generative AI tools, personal injury lawyer Jay Stefani says. “I know some other lawyers disagree, but I like that we don’t have malpractice claims or HIPAA violations.” (Photo courtesy of Jay Stefani)
“Imagine being in the worst stretch of time in your life, and then somebody gives you this test with 28 questions,” he says. “That’s terrible. But if we can give that to them already answered 80% to 90% of the way and ask them to review it, that’s a much different experience.”
Personal injury attorneys use AI for several other tasks, including case vetting and intake.
Before even taking a case, Simon, who was an early investor in EvenUp, asks AI to review medical records, expert depositions and other documents to determine if it’s worth his time.
“Sometimes we’re brought in last-minute and have to make the call—do we want to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to have the opportunity to try to win this case?” Simon says. “We have to review those records quickly, and this helps us do that.”
Among his other AI tools, Simon uses Finch, a pre-litigation personal injury startup, to handle client intake calls and collect information, including police reports and medical records. EsquireTek, an AI platform that helps personal injury lawyers automate the discovery process, is another “huge time-saver,” he says.
Trial prep
Personal injury attorneys also incorporate general-purpose AI tools into their practices.
Caleb Miller, a trial lawyer with Aldous Law in Dallas, primarily uses Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, to assist with trial preparation.
“It is a way to fine-tune your work and capture viewpoints and inconsistencies that you might overlook when you are in the weeds on a case,” says personal injury lawyer Caleb Miller. (Photo courtesy of Caleb Miller)
Before using a focus group to test a case, he asks Claude to review prepared scripts for neutrality and suggest areas where he should strengthen the defense’s arguments to better anticipate opposing viewpoints. He also uses the tool to identify weaknesses in expert depositions.
“AI is providing access to trial preparation strategy and tools that before had basically been reserved for only the big cases or the firms that could afford it,” he says.
Miller has asked Claude to simulate a diverse panel of 20 to 30 potential jurors for voir dire practice ahead of a trial. Using its voice mode, he posed questions and received “real-life” responses from the jurors, he says.
Lawyers can upload court records into Claude or other AI tools and ask them to simulate questions a judge may ask during a hearing or help prepare for a cross-examination, Miller adds. He notes that while AI isn’t perfect, “it’s better than what you can do by yourself right now.”
“It is a way to fine-tune your work and capture viewpoints and inconsistencies that you might overlook when you are in the weeds on a case,” Miller says.
Handle with care
Despite its benefits, Miller cautions personal injury lawyers to avoid using AI as a starting point for their work.
“It should be used after you’ve prepped yourself, after you know the case well and after you’ve come up with creative ideas,” Miller says. “Otherwise, it takes the art out of being a trial lawyer.”
Personal injury lawyers need to be careful when inputting confidential information into AI tools, Stefani adds. He recommends using closed AI systems to avoid ethical challenges and security concerns.
That’s the case even with paid versions of open-source generative AI tools. “I would not be comfortable as a lawyer putting clients’ sensitive information in there,” Stefani says. “I know some other lawyers disagree, but I like that we don’t have malpractice claims or HIPAA violations.”
See also:
Software options are expanding for personal injury lawyers
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