I'm Running a 25-Person Plaintiff’s Firm. AI Is How I Stay Ahead.

At five o'clock on a Thursday evening, opposing counsel filed a surreply: federal case law, a 244-line privilege log, the works. The hearing was at nine the next morning. It was the kind of move designed to leave a plaintiff's lawyer scrambling, underprepared, or begging for a continuance.

My partner Jeremy Thurman didn't do any of those things.

He uploaded the cases and the privilege log into our AI-platform Eve, layered them against the discovery already in the system, and started asking questions. One hour later, he had a complete oral argument distinguishing every cited case and a line-by-line breakdown exposing the privilege log as 90% junk. Documents created before the incident. Errors that would have taken days to catch by hand.

"I walked into court the next morning and tore them up," Jeremy said. "They thought they caught us off guard. I presented the court with a breakdown of the privilege log and distinguished every one of their federal cases. I had it figured out within an hour."

I run a multi-million dollar plaintiff's firm in Oklahoma City with more than 25 employees. My job is to move the chess pieces. To put people in positions where they can do their best work, keep us on the cutting edge, and make sure we're delivering for our clients.

What Jeremy pulled off that morning confirmed something I'd already started to believe: the economics of plaintiff's practice are shifting, and the firms that figure it out first will have an enormous advantage.

What AI actually looks like at a plaintiff's firm

There's a lot of noise right now about AI in the legal profession. Most of it is abstract. So let me tell you what's concrete.

We're currently handling the State Farm storm damage bad faith litigation here in Oklahoma. Big case. Short fuse. Two-year statutes ticking on many of the claims.

Instead of preparing 20 cases for review, we've positioned more than 200 in a very short timeframe. Eve builds the damage models, organizes records, and surfaces what matters across hundreds of files at once. A year ago, that volume would have required hiring an entire team. Today, our existing people handle it, faster and with better work product.

That one project will pay for our entire AI investment this year.

Jeremy uses AI and Eve differently than I do. He's in the trenches on individual cases while I'm managing the firm. He handles catastrophic injury work: death cases, product liability, corporate defendants with thousands of pages of discovery. He put it in a way I think every plaintiff's lawyer should hear:

"It's like having an associate who has read every document in your file and knows everything about the case. I just sit down and start asking questions, and it guides me right to what I need."

The leverage is real. 

Jeremy was evaluating a death case involving a guardrail failure, airbag product liability, and driver negligence. Multiple theories, massive document sets. He talked through the issues with Eve conversationally and had the supporting documents in hours, not days. He's also started dictating field notes at accident scenes and inspection sites, something he hadn't done since 2004, and uploading the transcripts so Eve can organize his observations into case memos. It understands what he means. That's a sentence I wouldn't have written two years ago.

Why this time is different

I've been practicing long enough to live through every major shift in legal technology. Law library to buying the books. Books to discs. Discs to Westlaw online. Every step made firms more productive because the tools caught up to the work.

AI is all of that on steroids.

"I was in law school the year Westlaw came out," Jeremy said. "We learned to research by books, and the next year I used Westlaw for the first time and it changed the whole game. Technologically speaking, this is the most powerful tool I've seen since that change."

That's from a lawyer who has tried cases for over two decades. It's not hype. It's pattern recognition.

But here's what makes this inflection point different: it doesn't just make existing work faster. It changes what you can take on.

I've added a new lawyer every year for the last four years because the workload keeps growing. There's no more bandwidth on any individual person I have. The only way to keep growing was to keep adding headcount.

Now there's another option. Make every person you already have dramatically more productive. Grow without throwing bodies at the problem.

Jeremy keeps using the word bandwidth, and I think it's the right one. It's not about replacing lawyers. It's about unlocking the capacity that's already sitting in your firm.

What about our younger lawyers?

There is one thing that keeps me up at night. AI has the potential to shortchange younger lawyers.

The work we used to give interns: combing through hundreds of pages of medical records, drafting the skeleton of a demand. Eve does it faster and more thoroughly than any law student could. That's the upside.

The downside is real. 

Those younger attorneys may never develop the instincts that come from doing it the hard way. They'll get a summary in thirty seconds instead of learning to spot what matters by pouring over the records themselves.

The output is only as good as the input, and the input is judgment. The questions you know to ask. The patterns you've learned to see. That's why I believe experienced lawyers who adopt AI will be more dangerous than younger ones who grew up with it. We bring the expertise. The technology multiplies it.

An investment, not an expense

There's a debate in our profession about whether to pass AI costs on to clients. Some lawyers charge per use as a case expense. We don't.

For a firm our size, this is a significant annual line item. But the productivity gains dwarf the cost, and the benefit should flow to clients in the form of better, faster representation.

AI isn't a case cost. It's infrastructure, in the same category as your phone system, your case management software, your Westlaw subscription. 

You don't bill clients for the lights being on. You invest in the lights because they let your people work.

What I'd tell other firm owners

It's not that you can't practice law without AI. You can. We did it for years.

But I know what we have now. And I wouldn't give it back.

"If you're managing a firm, you are doing an incredible service to your employees by giving them these resources," Jeremy said. "It allows them to be the best version of themselves."

My job is to build a firm where great lawyers can do great work. AI is how I'm making sure that happens.

Noble McIntyre, senior partner and owner of McIntyre Law in Oklahoma City, is the former President of the Oklahoma Association for Justice.