Sites like ChatGPT have gotten a bad rap in recent months as attorneys have faced consequences for using the AI assistant, which can sometimes "hallucinate" and make up legal rules or even full cases. But Stock assured a roomful of lawyers on Thursday that AI is not only the future but that it will make their lives significantly easier in kick-starting a new firm.
"Where we are going to have the great equalizer in the solo community is with AI," Stock said. "AI will be able to be our support staff. AI will be able to be our associates. If we utilize it correctly, responsibly, efficiently, it's going to make the practice of law much more enjoyable."
For attorneys who are thinking about starting their own practice, here are five ways that AI can make their lives easier, according to Stock.
Getting Ideas on Paper
While AI's ability to draft and write legal documents has fallen under scrutiny, the technology can be a huge help in areas of the business of law that attorneys might not expect, Stock said.
For instance, you can record a team meeting directly in ChatGPT, and it will write up a summary of what was discussed in minutes. Attorneys can even talk to the app themselves and more succinctly summarize their ideas.
"The time it takes getting the thoughts in my brain on paper, AI can do it in minutes," Stock said.
Forecasting Cash Flow
More advanced legal technology can also essentially serve as a business and financial adviser for attorneys, Stock said. Quickbooks, a site many attorneys use to manage their accounting, now has a cash flow forecast feature, which can use an attorney's monthly expenses and expected income to predict the exact day that lawyer might run out of cash completely.
"Knowing the exact day that you are going to run into trouble is the difference between having a business and not having a business, particularly for a startup business," Stock said.
The feature can connect to other management systems, like Clio, so it can see what outstanding invoices attorneys have from clients, and attorneys can also manually input business they are expecting to get in future months.
"It actually gets really detailed to the point that it knows if a particular client paid you earlier last month, and as you get to the next month, it'll tell you, 'Hey, there's a good chance you're going to have more cash early,'" Stock said.
The service can allow attorneys to be realistic about their revenue and change course when appropriate. It also allows them to have a clearer picture of how hard they should be working and when they can take a break.
"Understanding the back end of the business can be transformational, because you can forecast these things," Stock said. "You know when you can go on vacation, you know if you need more clients."
Storing Data
In any legal practice, Stock said, it's important to have "a single source of truth." Attorneys need to have everything in one place — their accounting, their legal documents, their client information, etc. And it's important to have this set up from the very beginning.
"By starting with a single source of truth from the beginning, you're not going to have to go through the most difficult thing the law firm can do, which is change systems or implement a new system," Stock said.
These days, most technology services don't work in isolation. Attorneys should make sure, when they're getting tech set up for their new firm, to work on sites that can be integrated into other legal tools, so they're never starting from scratch. Having one set of data that is connected to other services also makes lawyers less likely to run into ethical problems, Stock said.
"Having a single source of truth is really important, because if an auditor comes in, they're not rifling through paper files and rifling through trust accounts going to different systems," he said. "Every time you add an additional source of truth, you add risk."
Legal technology not only makes this easy and possible, it can also add value. Because they have the full picture of a lawyer's business and legal practice, some sites will help attorneys automatically send out email updates or reminders to clients. This can improve communication between an attorney and clients, which is often an ethical sticking point for small firm lawyers in particular.
This kind of technology can also, on the back end, make it easy for an attorney to one day sell their practice.
"If you have one set of data that then flows through to all these other areas, it actually makes your business much more valuable to sell because you've got an accurate reflection of what your business looks like," he said.
Making a Website
Making a website is often one of the first, and most tedious, steps in opening a new law firm, and Stock said many attorneys struggle to find the time to set one up.
While there are third-party content services a lawyer can hire to create a website, Stock said many of them are expensive and "pretty bad." But an attorney can use ChatGPT to write all the content that goes on a website, from the "about" page to descriptions of each practice area and attorney bios.
"We don't like to use templates often because our words are our craft," Stock said. "This allows you to still use your words as your craft, but this gives you a starting point to be able to insert your own words and create your own content, so you can be really specific about it."
Stock said he used ChatGPT to generate all the content for a company he co-founded in March 2023, ShiftSixOS, which connects lawyers with offshore support staff. He said it took him about an hour, and then he just had to buy a domain name and spend several hundred dollars for a freelancer to build and design the website and create his logo.
"In fact, now you can do the imagery on ChatGPT," he said. "You can create a logo. It's never quite as good as the person doing it, but right now, you can get really creative."
Filling the Role of Support Staff
While it used to be that a paralegal or law firm administrative job was a lucrative option for recent college or even high school grads, the talent pool for these positions has been shrinking in recent years, Stock said, in large part because those employees are drifting toward big tech companies instead.
As administrative staff becomes harder to find and more expensive, AI can help fill in the gaps. The key to using the technology to its greatest potential, Stock said, is to work with legal-specific technology companies.
"Legal tech providers have got a number of safeguards in place and agreements with the back-end providers like ChatGPT that they will never use your information for training, and they only use your data to generate answers," Stock said.
Once lawyers have the proper protections in place, the sky's the limit for what AI can do for them, Stock said. The AI models have gotten so advanced that they can recognize an attorney's writing style and voice after a while and help draft emails and other communications with clients, as well as generating content for a firm's blog or website.
"Something that I've heard a lot is, 'ChatGPT is going to take over the job of lawyers,'" Stock said. "The real answer is that AI will not replace lawyers, but lawyers that use AI will replace lawyers that don't."
--Editing by Rich Mills.
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