Freeburg & Granieri used to spend 25 to 30 hours drafting a single employment complaint. Now it takes under four. Discovery responses that consumed full days get turned around before lunch. 

The Pasadena employment law firm has restructured every major workflow around one catalyst: Eve.

"She's the best team member I've ever worked with," says founding partner Christy Granieri.

Granieri and Greg Freeburg started the firm in February 2021 with two attorneys, one client, and what Granieri calls "a hope and a dream." Less than five years later, they have a team of 14, and the attorneys focus their time on actually being attorneys.

From Days to Hours

When the firm started bringing in more clients than the two partners could handle, the bottleneck was clear. The process was manual and slow, and it limited how many cases the firm could take on.

Paul Granieri, the firm’s Director of Operations, evaluated 10 or 11 legal AI platforms before finding Eve. None of the others came close.

“When I saw a complaint that Eve drafted, I wanted to jump all over it,” he says. “What stood out to me overwhelmingly was the accuracy. Eve took the actual data that we had and used that information accurately.”

Today the firm drafts complaints in under four hours. The paralegals run intake data through Eve’s drafting playbooks, refine the output, and get it to a partner for final review. What used to consume days now moves through the firm in a fraction of the time.

From Four Complaints a Month to Six

The time savings changed more than the workflow. They changed the firm’s staffing model.

Before Eve, Freeburg & Granieri required its paralegals to draft four complaints per month. Attorneys handled two. That was the ceiling given the hours each complaint demanded.

“We were able to refocus our attorneys onto legal work, taking depositions, appearing in court, and those things that you really do need a bar license to do,” Christy Granieri says. “Since Eve, I moved all initial drafting of our complaints onto our paralegals and they’re up to six a month.”

The firm now runs 15 custom drafting playbooks in Eve, each tailored to a specific type of employment case: discrimination, sexual harassment, misclassification with wage and hour claims. Every variation has its own playbook with samples and expected output baked in. Granieri describes it as “paint by numbers” for her team.

Discovery, Meet and Confer, and Everything Else

Complaints were just the first use case. Granieri worked with the Eve team to expand into discovery, case timelines, meet and confer letters, and requests for admissions.

Meet and confer letters that used to take an attorney an hour or two to produce a draft now take 10 minutes. Document indexing that once consumed hours drops to a working index in 30 seconds. And when Granieri recently opposed a motion for summary judgment involving over 1,400 pages of documents, she estimates Eve saved her at least 10 hours on that single motion.

Eve “got me 80, 90 percent of the way there,” Christy Granieri says. “This is my first time opposing a summary judgment motion while utilizing Eve, and it’s been absolutely life changing.”

Paul Granieri says Eve’s timeline feature blew his mind. 

Eve could take the plaintiff’s version of events and the defense’s version, build a timeline under each, and surface the discrepancies between them. “One thing I would never, ever go back to,” he says, “is drafting a complaint or a demand letter based off a previous case template.”

Running a Law Firm Like a Business

Paul Granieri’s mandate at Freeburg & Granieri is straightforward: make sure the firm operates like a business. That means eliminating log jams, cutting wasted time, and making sure attorneys spend their hours on work that requires a bar license.

“What Eve has really done is help us run the law firm like a properly built business,” he says. “We’ve taken out a lot of guesswork and administrative time. We’ve been able to scale the skillset of our two managing partners very well.”

The economics have shifted as well. Before Eve, taking on more cases meant hiring more people. Now the firm handles higher volume with the same headcount.

Don’t Be Left in the Dust

Christy Granieri does not mince words when asked about firms that have not adopted AI.

“Stop being an idiot,” she says. “Those that don’t adopt are gonna be left in the dust. You can’t be competitive with the big dogs anymore without using technology because at the end of the day, the person that’s gonna suffer is your client.”

Paul Granieri takes a longer view. “If you’re gonna criticize me about using AI in law, you’re the kind of person that would’ve criticized me for using a computer 30 years ago.”

Freeburg & Granieri brought Eve into the operation and restructured every major workflow around it. The complaints move faster, the discovery is sharper, and the attorneys spend their time being attorneys.

“Eve has created the efficiency which creates profitability,” Granieri says, and they now “have more time to actually connect with and work with our clients.”

Learn more about the firm’s AI adoption process in this on-demand webinar.

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