James Farrin admits he’s not a natural technologist. "I'm kind of a Luddite," he says. "I have my piece of paper and pen, and I'm happy with it."

He started his practice with just one paralegal and 23 clients. Now, the Law Offices of James Scott Farrin is one of the largest plaintiff firms in the Mid-Atlantic. More than 60 attorneys handle personal injury, workers' compensation, social security, mass tort, and eminent domain cases across North and South Carolina.

Farrin built his firm on old-fashioned values: a process-driven approach, high standards, and a devotion to clients. But watching the legal landscape shift, he recognized that his tools had to as well.

“Technology has moved from being an accelerant for businesses to being essential to thrive,” he explains. “AI is an important tool. We'd be fools not to use it.”

The question, then, wasn’t whether to adopt AI. It was how to roll it out to a firm of 300 people without leaving anyone behind.

Implementing AI at Scale with the “Wow” Factor

Ryan Bliss, the firm’s Director of Legal Technology and head of the workers’ compensation department, led the Eve implementation. 

First, they addressed the primary consideration for many law firms: ethics and compliance. "We have to make sure the AI model is not being used to train itself using our client's data," Bliss explains. The team verified Eve's security compliance (including SOC2 and HIPAA) and developed an Acceptable Use Policy for the entire firm to sign. 

The strategy wasn’t to mandate adoption right away but to engineer a moment of persuasive clarity. He created an implementation team of people who are technologically sophisticated, interested in AI, and familiar with firm operations. They would learn the platform and develop use cases. 

“It was like an ‘Avengers, assemble!’ moment,” he remembers. 

They interviewed each department to understand what was causing the biggest bottlenecks and then built customized tools that would work at a push of a button. At the demos, "We threw Eve up on the screen and said, 'We understand you spend a lot of time summarizing medical records. This is a button that says summarize medical records, and look what happens,'" Bliss recalls. 

"We worked hard to develop that ‘wow’ factor. People were immediately emailing me asking, 'When can I have this?' They couldn't get it fast enough."

Saving Time Across Cases

The time savings showed up immediately. Jennifer Horn, who oversees firm operations, watched tasks that once took days collapse into minutes.

"Medical summaries that used to take weeks — we're talking 30 minutes, maybe an hour on a big case," Horn says. "Deposition outlines where attorneys would spend days reviewing records? They're knocking it out in 15, 20 minutes.”

The gains run the length of the case. Eve is embedded from the first question of whether the case is worth filing through discovery, deposition prep, and exhibit selection.

"Eve can speed up everything we do,” Horn explains. “And it's really good at finding inconsistencies in testimony. Defendants will give you their story in interrogatories, then you take their deposition, and within a click you can see where they're not being accurate. It gives you an advantage over every defense attorney who isn't using it.”

More striking data came from Bliss's department. One workers' compensation attorney — someone Bliss describes as "the last person we would've thought would take to this technology" — became Eve's biggest champion, as he cut his average case time in half.

"For five years, his average case length hovered around seven or eight months," Bliss reports. Focusing only on cases where Eve was used throughout, that average fell to four months.

A Higher Level of Client Service

“You used to have to compromise,” Bliss explains. “You could be thorough or you could be fast. AI lets you be both.”

One department head blocked off two days to prepare for a deposition. He tried Eve instead and knocked it out in a few hours. “Think about how much more time he was able to give to other cases,” Horn says. “Before, you had a lot of administrative tasks. Now we can shift that to Eve and give everything we have to bring full value to the case and give a higher level of client care."

Farrin frames it as a philosophy: "Technology and AI is meant not to be between us and our clients, but behind us and our clients. It allows us to do a better job face-to-face, but I don't want it to be a substitute for the human client experience."

A Partner, Not Just an AI Tool

Farrin has dealt with enough software vendors to know the pattern: outsiders who hand you a solution that is “almost like a straitjacket” and doesn’t actually work.

With Eve, something was different. "What really sold me," he says, "was that they would listen. If we said we needed something, we had their ear."

Horn saw it from a different angle. "The reasons we went with Eve was the quality of the product, but also the people," she says. "They spoke honestly about the product and weren't trying to show us smoke and mirrors. That fits who we are."

That relationship has deepened. The firm meets weekly with the Eve team and sits down directly with their developers. "Most of us in those meetings are former paralegals or settlement administrators," Horn notes. "You're actually getting feedback from the people who are going to use it the most."

Looking Ahead

This is the kind of partnership a firm built on old-fashioned values should expect. And it’s just getting started. "I think we're scratching the surface on how Eve is going to transform our law firm," said Farrin, adding that a coming integration with the firm's case management system, Jove, should be "transformative."

But for Farrin, the core remains. "Good old-fashioned human interaction will not go out of style," he says. "We're going to keep the old-fashioned values with the new technology. The two need to go hand in hand."

Farrin’s message to firms still on the fence is direct: "The sooner you get on board the train, the less likely you're going to get run over by it,” he says. "You have to win over hearts and minds. There will be growing pains. But it has to be done."

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

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