How large language models are leveling the personal injury playing field

As AI becomes ever more pervasive in day-to-day life, some personal injury attorneys are using it to expand their legal teams.

AI platforms are answering phone calls and taking down messages, marketing on social media, and acting as a sounding board for ideas and to help edit drafts and comb through medical records.

For this assistance, attorneys are using an array of legal tools on the market, including EvenUp, Capture Now, Chat-GPT, Claude.AI and Westlaw.

Their use can help level the playing field for solo-practitioners and small personal injury firms, allowing them to navigate challenging caseloads with small teams.

Practical uses for PI attorneys

Erica B. Slater of Gunn Slater in Clayton, Missouri recently used AI in a case that resulted in an eight-figure jury verdict and led to essential safety changes to a faulty medical product.

AI has been a useful tool when working on legal briefs, she said.

“In the editing process for a brief … it was very helpful to me to pop a phrase, or two sentences, into AI and say, ‘rewrite this for me, more concise and don’t lose the point,’” Slater said. “It allowed me to edit things much faster and really help make my writing more cohesive without just rewriting the same sentences over again.”

She likened AI assistance to having another person in the room to bounce ideas off of. This was especially helpful when preparing briefs after hours when her law partner wasn’t in the office to talk to.

“I also found it very helpful in preparing for trial,” Slater said. “Anytime you’re preparing a complex product or medical malpractice case for trial, there’s going to be a lot of evidence and testimony that you have to revisit as we go through the cases and work them up.”

This could mean a deposition taken over three years ago is on your mind, but you haven’t re-read the transcript in months. Utilizing AI, Slater and her law partner Amy Collignon Gunn have created projects (with client consent and confidentiality measures in place) that allow them to easily review testimony and pleadings filed in the case.

“[Where previously] we might have had law clerks summarize depositions line by line with page and line numbers of the concepts, I was able to do that in minutes or less,” Slater said.

Gunn said she has also found tools like Claude Pro useful for generating deposition questions.

“I just type in ‘This is what my case is about. I’ve got a deposition of a corporate representative coming up. What questions would you ask?’ And it spits out a whole bunch of questions. Some make no sense whatsoever, but some really trigger my brain to think,” Gunn said.

AI is just an aid, she cautioned.

“We don’t use it for demand letters or anything very specific to clients,” Gunn said. “But [for] getting your mind around themes [it] has been really … useful.”

Nathan Perlmutter, a personal injury attorney with Simon Law who focuses on medical malpractice cases, said he primarily uses AI in his day-to-day work to summarize and comb through medical records and to help with idea generation and refinement.

In med-mal practices “there are often tens of thousands of pages of records detailing my client’s treatment history,” he said. “It’s exactly the type of thing that AI, especially today, can digest and summarize.”

He recently used AI to analyze records in a case where a young girl suffered a brain injury shortly after birth.

“The crux of the injury was caused by hypoglycemia, which is low blood sugar. And something that was important in this case was figuring out what glucose tests were ordered and when, and what those results were,” Perlmutter said. “I could have a clerk or a paralegal spend a couple hours looking through the records, finding all the glucose results and making a timeline. But instead, I can just use [a] HIPAA compliant AI platform that can digest those records.”

‘Leveling the playing field’

E.C. Duckworth, a solo practitioner in Columbia, Missouri, uses AI for several aspects of his practice including marketing, idea generation, and intake.

“I use an AI answering service,” he said. “We have a receptionist, but the receptionist just works … the normal business hours … and then the AI answering service does after hours.”

This helps ensure leads aren’t lost, and important information from clients or insurance adjusters is documented, he said.

He also uses AI for generating marketing ideas.

“Personal injury is a competitive space.” Duckworth said. “You’re always looking for new ideas and marketing, so whether it’s looking for ideas for social media posts or blog ideas, it can be useful [for] brainstorming those marketing topics.

“I still think there’s limitations to AI’s ability,” he added. “I don’t think at this point it fully replaces legal assistants or paralegals, but I do think it can help even the playing field with a smaller firm like mine,”

Slater advises attorneys still cautious about AI adoption to consider trying it.

“Just pick a low-risk situation, even something that’s not client related,” she said. “Give yourself some time to play around with it.”