With the powerful advantages of Artificial Intelligence (AI) come the challenge of measuring those advantages. Calculating the hours saved and accounting for your firm’s ability to accomplish more tasks more quickly, without adding to your staff headcount, gives you a clear understanding of an AI solution’s impact. This article, which describes processes specific to plaintiff lawyers and legal staff practicing personal injury and labor and employment law, provides guidance and a few simple formulas to measure your firm’s time savings and capacity increases across different tasks, workflows, and areas of operation, so you can assess efficiencies and, eventually, determine the return you’re getting on your AI investment (ROI).
Establish a Baseline
It’s crucial to start measuring time savings and capacity improvements when your firm is still in the AI adoption process—ideally, even before implementation begins—to establish a baseline and track progress. You’ll notice that the calculation formulas below follow a simple before-and-after model.
What are Time Savings?
It’s exactly what it sounds like: the time your firm saves after augmenting tasks with AI tools. Attorneys report that hours of tedious manual work are eliminated through the use of AI. Tasks that once took hours can now be completed in minutes, including drafting demand letters and complaints, responding to discovery requests, preparing mediation briefs, analyzing medical chronologies, and other similarly time-consuming tasks.
You don’t need an advanced system to measure the impact of AI on your workflows. Simply track the time spent on tasks done manually before adopting AI tools, and then compare it with the time spent on functions done after adoption, with AI assistance.
Simple Formula to Reveal Time Savings and Efficiency Gains:
Time Savings = Current Time Spent (Before AI) - Time Spent (Using AI)
Example Calculation: Drafting a Medical Chronology
Current Time Spent: 960 minutes (16 hours)
Time Spent Using AI: 480 minutes (8 hours)
Time Savings: 480 minutes (8 hours)
To get a time savings per case, sum up the time saved across all relevant tasks. For example, if you used AI for intake and evaluation, drafting a medical chronology, and discovery responses:
Intake and Evaluation: 50 minutes saved
Med Chron: 480 minutes saved
Discovery responses: 300 minutes saved
Total Time Savings: 50 minutes + 480 minutes + 300 minutes = 830 minutes saved (approximately 14 hours saved)
This gives you the cumulative time savings for each case. To get a yearly savings calculation, you can multiply this per-case result by the number of cases you take in a year.
How to Quantify Increased Capacity:
First, let’s define what is meant by increased capacity for calculation. Strictly speaking, you are evaluating the capacity of your staff to take on more cases, potentially resolve cases faster, and be more selective about which cases to accept—all without needing to allocate additional talent, time, and other resources.
Step 1: Before adopting AI, establish a baseline for the number of cases accepted within a specified timeframe, such as monthly or yearly. Tip: Using averages over multiple similar cases will establish the most reliable baseline.
Step 2: After AI adoption, track how many cases your firm can accept after AI is integrated into your work processes.
Step 3: Compare and calculate the before-and-after numbers to quantify the improvement.
Suggested Metric: Measure increased capacity per staff member (i.e., paralegal, attorney, etc.)
Per-Case Calculation (Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly)
Current Cases (Before AI): 10 cases
Cases After AI Adoption: 20 cases
Increased Cases: 10 cases (50% improvement)
Case Capacity Increase = Cases After AI - Current Cases (Before AI)
Percentage: 50% increase
In conclusion, strategic AI adoption enables plaintiffs' law firms to take on more cases without compromising quality or requiring additional resources. Ultimately, this leads to higher profits and, most importantly, greater access to justice for those who need it.
Look for a follow-up blog post on how to factor in added case value and improved settlement outcomes into an accurate, robust ROI determination.
