Introducing Eve 2.0: The Proactive AI Workforce for Plaintiff Firms
Introducing Eve 2.0: The Proactive AI Workforce for Plaintiff firms
Introducing Eve 2.0: The Proactive AI Workforce for Plaintiff Firms
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The term “AI lawyer” can mean two different things, and they're often confused.
In one version, an AI lawyer is software: a chatbot that answers legal questions, reviews documents, or generates contracts without a human attorney involved. These tools exist and are useful in narrow contexts.
The other version is an AI-first lawyer: an attorney who has made AI an engine of how they practice, not a tool they reach for occasionally. In plaintiff law firms, that looks like AI handling intake, record review, drafting, and discovery, so they can focus on the work that actually requires a lawyer.
Josh White, founder of Laurel Employment Law, describes being an AI lawyer as "having a very good senior associate who works at the speed of light with encyclopedic knowledge of every document in your case."
An AI attorney in this sense has offloaded the information work to software that handles it faster and more completely than any associate could. What comes back to the attorney is the work that requires one: strategy, judgment, client relationship, knowing when to push and when to settle.
When plaintiff practices talk about AI for lawyers, this is what they mean: software integrated so deeply into daily practice that removing it would break how work gets done.
Across plaintiff practices, AI handles the volume work that pulls attorneys away from client relationships and case strategy.
In workers' comp, the information pressure is constant — clients with denied claims need answers while they're still on the phone. Mack Babcock, who has practiced workers' comp in Denver for nearly two decades, describes the shift. Before AI, answering those questions meant pulling records, reviewing them, and calling back. Now he answers while the client is still on the phone: "I can be on the phone with a client and type a question into my legal AI tool while we're talking."
In seconds, he has the denial date, the physician advisor review behind it, and any response from the treating physician — all with citations. For someone whose surgery is being denied and whose income depends on a timely authorization, getting an answer while still on the phone is different in kind from waiting for a callback.
In nursing home abuse and neglect, the challenge is document volume. Cases involve hundreds of thousands of records, sometimes millions. Dawn Smith, managing partner at Smith Clinesmith, describes what used to happen: "You would go into a warehouse with a huge table, 20 lawyers, sit down at the table, and you'd just start going through documents, hundreds of thousands, millions of documents."
With AI, one person can go through that material in minutes instead of weeks. The economics change accordingly: "As a firm owner, the economics is just a total game changer. I can be as efficient as 20 people."
There's an irony in the term "AI lawyer" that Dawn Smith names directly. The attorneys who use AI most thoroughly are the ones who spend the most time doing what lawyers actually do. "With all of the time that I save," she says, "I get to actually be a lawyer." The information work that used to consume her day — the warehouse tables, the document review, the deposition prep that could take hours — now runs on AI. What's left is the practice she built for.
James Farrin, president of James Scott Farrin, hears the same thing measured in preparation time: "This would have taken me all day, or half a day of preparation. I did it in an hour." Multiply that across every significant matter in a year and the arithmetic becomes real. Farrin's firm started with him, a paralegal, and 23 clients. It now has 60-plus attorneys and 280 employees. He credits AI with part of that trajectory: "It allows us to take more cases that make us better."
The more interesting question beneath "AI lawyer" isn't whether software can replace an attorney. It's what using AI makes possible for the attorney who does.
For the lawyers in this piece, the answer looks roughly the same across different practices: more time for the work that drew them to law in the first place. Babcock answers his client's question before they hang up. Smith walks into depositions with the entire record already in hand. Farrin's attorneys convert what used to be a full day of preparation into an hour and decide what to do with the rest.
None of them say they're working harder or that AI is doing everything for them. They say they're working like lawyers.
For a closer look at what it means when an entire firm is structured around AI rather than individual attorneys adopting it, see What Is an AI-Native Law Firm?.
