You bought an expensive typewriter

Opposing counsel was halfway through his opening when he made a confident, specific claim about the record. Tad Thomas felt the thing every trial lawyer dreads. Did I miss that?

He didn't wait to find out. He pulled up the record and asked Eve where the claim came from. Nowhere. The lawyer was wrong. Tad had the documents in hand inside a minute, put it to the witness the next morning, and worked that fact against them for the rest of the week.

Twenty years ago that same moment cost him a day. A note to himself, an associate sent digging overnight, a jury spending the next session believing the other side while he caught up.

Closing that gap, from a full day down to under a minute, is what everyone is really selling when they pitch trial lawyers on AI. They just describe it wrong. They call it speed.

Last chance!

One click below and you keep it.

Speed is the least interesting thing AI does.

Every pitch leads with time: draft the demand faster, summarize the deposition faster, turn four hours of brief-writing into fifteen minutes. Real hours, worth having when you run a firm. But nobody wins a trial on turnaround time. Faster is a convenience, not an edge, and a lawyer who takes only that from AI has missed the part that decides cases.

What wins is walking in having missed nothing.

The limit was always memory, and nobody holds ten thousand pages in their head. So you missed things, found them too late, and lived with it. That was the job. Not anymore. The whole record sits in one place, and you can check any claim against it in the time it takes to ask. It makes you a lawyer nobody can slip anything past.

You can watch it hold up under fire. Casey Geiger was mid-trial in Georgia when the defense sprang a brand-new theory in opening: his client's brain injury was really a rash on her leg. He pulled the records, built his cross in minutes, and never let the jury see he had been blindsided. The Defense Called It a Rash. The Jury Called It $15.2 Million.

The same instinct shows up long before trial. Bibi Fell won $105 million in San Diego and credits it to the anxiety that makes her overprepare for everything. She calls it walking in "with twice what you need so that what comes out feels effortless." How Bibi Fell Won a $105M Verdict With Social Anxiety

The excuse is gone, and the floor came up for everyone.

"I didn't find it in time" used to be a real excuse. There were only so many hours in the night, so many associates, so many boxes you could carry into a courtroom. Trial strategy on both sides quietly ran on the same bet: that the other lawyer would never reach the one document that mattered in time.

That bet is dead. If you miss it now, it is because you didn't prepare, not because you couldn't. And the defense bar has these tools too. The good ones are running the exact same play, aimed the other way. The question walking into court is no longer whether you can hold the whole record. It is whether you bothered to.

Tad's piece has the part we skipped: the how. He breaks down his actual prep, right down to the simulated jury panel that tells him how his closing plays in the county where he's trying the case. What AI Actually Changed: It Was Never About Speed

One more thing

The phone number for George Sink Injury Lawyers is all nines. Over the years the firm turned that into a jingle, then a full original rap video, the kind of thing that has no business being this polished for a personal injury spot.

It worked on exactly the audience you would least expect. A four-year-old in South Carolina named Landen Shell got so hooked on the number that he asked his mother for an all-nines George Sink birthday party. Most kids that age want dinosaurs. Landen wanted the personal injury lawyer from TV, so that is what he got: cupcakes with a 9 piped on every one, and a birthday boy dressed, inevitably, to the nines.

Then Sink himself turned up to surprise him and handed out little red ties, the ones he wears in the ads, to a room full of preschoolers. His own review of the whole thing: "What a weird phenomenon this is." Landen said meeting him beat everything else about the day. The logical next milestone, of course, is his ninth birthday.

You can buy a billboard. Or you can get a four-year-old to sing your phone number until he wants it on his birthday cake. We rounded up the six firms pulling this off in the inaugural Torties. It is the most fun you will have reading about lawyer advertising all year.

Hit reply and tell me: what's the thing AI caught in your case that you would have missed on your own? I read every one, and the best answers run in a future issue.

Miss nothing.

~ Adam

Next week this email only goes to subscribers.

Quote of the week:

"If all you take from AI is faster documents, you bought an expensive typewriter."

- Tad Thomas, Thomas Law Offices, on what AI really changes for trial lawyers.