You have heard enough about AI.
Here is what to do with it.

The wrong person

Count what has been pitched to your firm this year. The research tool. The drafting assistant. The summarizer, the clause library, the chatbot for your website. Add the articles, the panels, the CLE sessions.

Every one of them puts you at the keyboard. Better prompts. Faster research. Draft the memo in half the time.

So you try it. It works. But your week does not change.

You do not see more clients. You do not see more of the right clients. You do not make any more money. You get the same work done a little faster, and then you sit down to the next thing.

Because getting the legal work done was never the whole business. The rest of it is intake, scheduling, funding, follow-up, billing, and the dozen small things that have to happen around a document.

The question is not how you use AI. It is how your firm uses AI.

Your firm is more than you and the documents you produce. There is an intake seat, a funding seat, a paralegal seat, a bookkeeping seat. Whether you have somebody in each of those or you are sitting in all of them yourself, that is where the week goes.

Making the attorney faster changes very little. Changing what happens in those other seats changes the whole business.

The work that is slowing you down

The voicemail nobody returned. The follow-up email that never went out. The funding question that sat three days because one person knew the answer.

None of that is people slacking. Everyone in your office is busy. The problem is that nobody knew which thing to do first, or had what they needed to do it well.

Calling a prospect back is easy. It is three minutes.

What is not easy is knowing which of the forty names to call today, reading the intake form, finding the notes from the last conversation, and working out what this particular person needs to hear. That is thirty minutes of file review before a three minute call can happen at all.

The task takes three minutes. Getting ready to do it takes thirty. That is where your week goes.

There are 114 automations running in our office as we write this. Not one of them arrived as a package. They accumulated one at a time, usually because somebody got tired of doing the same thing twice.

The one that matters most runs every five minutes. It checks which voicemails have not been returned and tells the person who needs to know. Nobody has to remember, nobody has to ask, and nobody finds out on Friday that a prospect called on Tuesday.

Who it is for

Solo attorneys, where you are the whole firm. You sit in every seat, and the thirty minutes of preparation comes out of the same day as the client meetings, the drafting, and the billing.

Small firms, where one attorney has an assistant or two. There are other hands now, but everything still routes through you, and you are the one who knows what each file needs next.

Firms with a few attorneys and a dozen or so staff. That is us. The work is spread across real departments, and a new problem appears: nobody can see the whole picture anymore, and things fall between people rather than getting dropped by one.

The problem does not go away as you grow. It changes shape.

At every one of those sizes, the same thing is true. The legal work is the part you trained for, but it is not the part eating the week.

The kinds of things you will get

One week might be a new model worth knowing about. Another might be something we built. Another could be a tool we tried and stopped paying for.

• What happened in AI this week, and whether it matters to an estate planning practice. A new model lands every few weeks but most of the profession never hears about it. We will tell you the two or three that change something, and skip the rest
• What we built, and what it does. The idea and the result. We cannot tell you exactly how to build it in your office, because that depends on the systems you already run, but you will see enough of the shape to know whether it fits
• Something small enough to try this week. One change, one person, one afternoon. What to hand them, what to expect the first time they run it, and what it looked like when we did it here
• Something your staff can run without you. Most of what gets written assumes the attorney is the one at the keyboard. We are more interested in what your intake person, your paralegal, or your funding person can do on their own, because that is the work that comes off your desk permanently
• A tool worth the time, or one that is not. There is a great deal of software being sold to law firms right now. Some of it is very good. We will tell you which we are paying for, which we tried and stopped using, and why

Why we are writing it

We went looking for this newsletter before we decided to write it.

We had started putting AI into our own firm and we wanted to know what everybody else was doing. Most of what we found was either breathless or surface level. You read it, you agree with all of it, and you put it down with nothing you can use on a file. And a fair amount of it was out of date. If the last thing you heard was that you need to get better at writing prompts, that advice expired two years ago.

What we could not find anywhere was the candid version. The one that tells you what a firm tried, what it did to the work, what broke along the way, and what they would do differently.

So we are writing that one. We use AI to help gather and organize it, which is itself part of the answer. But what goes in it, and the judgment about what matters to an estate planning practice, comes from running one.

No theory. One working estate planning firm, telling you what it is doing about this, a week at a time.