AI or associate? How language models are leveling the personal injury playing field

Summary

• Personal injury attorneys are using AI to summarize medical records, review depositions, and assist with trial preparation.
• AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, EvenUp, Capture Now, and Westlaw are helping small firms compete with larger practices.
• Lawyers emphasize AI’s value as a support tool for drafting, editing, brainstorming, intake, and marketing—not as a replacement for attorneys or staff.
• Concerns remain over AI hallucinations, confidentiality, ethical obligations, and the need for HIPAA-compliant platforms.text

As AI continues to evolve and become ever more pervasive in day-to-day life, some attorneys are using it as an expansion of their legal teams.

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

For this assistance, attorneys use an array of legal tools on the market, all of which have pros and cons of their own including: EvenUp, Capture Now, Chat-GPT, Claude.AI and West Law.

Most seem similar to the attorneys interviewed for this publication, but how one uses them can 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, recently used AI in a case that resulted in an eight-figure verdict and essential safety changes to a faulty medical product. Recently, AI has been a useful tool when working on legal briefs, Slater said.

“I think, in the editing process for a brief, not in the legal research process and not in the drafting process, (…) 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 me rewriting the same sentences over again.”

Slater likened the 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 go revisit as we go through the cases and work them up. We kind of build our body of knowledge and our feelings about the evidence little by little over months to years, sometimes.”

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

“Whereas we might have 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. “And it was pretty good and pretty accurate. It was kind of all things that are on background. So, it was a quick way to refresh your preparation with evidence that you may not have touched in the case for a long time, even if it has already contributed to your understanding of the case.”

Gunn said the firm has opted to use Claude Pro over other tools on the market because it isn’t a large enterprise system and is a better fit for their small practice. She emphasized that it seems to have a better grasp on writing and grammar.

Gunn said she finds the tool useful for generating deposition questions.

“I will just type in like ‘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 of which make no sense whatsoever, but some of them really trigger my brain to think,” Gunn said. “Then I’ll take that thought and write out some legitimate questions that I use in the deposition.”

Still, Gunn said she considers AI an aid and not a replacement for anything the attorneys or staff typically handle.

“We don’t use it for demand letters or anything very specific to the clients. We’re still very concerned about confidentiality,” Gunn said. “But getting your mind around themes and to focus on a particular case has been really interesting and useful.”

Nathan Perlmutter, a personal injury attorney with Simon Law, 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, similar to how Gunn and Slater use the technology.

“I have a lot of focus on medical malpractice cases. That’s a big part of my caseload. There’s often tens of thousands of pages of records detailing my client’s treatment history, and something that’s done and takes forever, and is something no one likes to do, is going through the medical records and seeing what they contain,” Perlmutter said. “What they are is basically a printout of text on a PDF and it’s exactly the type of thing that AI, especially today, can digest and summarize.”

A recent medical malpractice case where Perlmutter utilized AI to analyze records involved a young girl who suffered a brain injury shortly after birth.

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

This particular example took place at a tipping point for Perlmutter, so he actually crafted the timeline himself before experimenting with AI.

“I compared the output to what I had crafted on my own in a few hours, and not only did it include everything that I included, but it found another result that I didn’t,” he said.

‘Leveling the playing field’

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

“For intake, I use an AI answering service,” Duckworth said. “So we have a receptionist, but the receptionist just works kind of the normal business hours (…) and then the AI answering service does after hours, or if the receptionist is on another call, it’ll do overflow.”

This helps to ensure leads aren’t lost, and important information from clients or insurance adjusters is documented, he said. Duckworth said he so far has not used the technology for much legal research, echoing Slater and Gunn’s fears of hallucinations and other legal horror stories. Instead, he uses it to help organize his drafts.

“The final way that I use AI in my personal injury practice is generating new ideas for marketing,” Duckworth said. “So obviously personal injury is a competitive space. You’re always looking for new ideas and marketing, so whether it’s looking for ideas for social media posts or blog ideas or whatnot, it can be useful just for kind of a brainstorming those marketing topics.”

One way this shows up in Duckworth’s marketing is his social media captions. Often, he will take a link to a blog post he wrote, feed it into AI and ask it to generate a caption based on the information for social media.

“I still think there’s limitations to AI’s ability. 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,” Duckworth said.

Concerns and hope

Though AI still has many pitfalls, Perlmutter said the technology is becoming much more natural and sophisticated every day.

“The outputs that you get when you converse with the language models like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini that everyone knows today were very artificial and easy to spot. And I think over time they’ve become more human-like and their outputs have become more refined,” Perlmutter said. “Everyone’s worried about hallucinations and those have come down. But, for the same reason that I said before, I never trust anything that’s not sourced.”

For attorneys still cautious about AI adoption, Slater says the barrier to entry is low and they should consider trying it.

“I think the important thing is not to fear monger about it and not be intimidated by it,” Slater said. “Just pick a low-risk situation, even something that’s not client related; some project that you need to get done that’s not client related and give yourself some time to play around with it.”

Two things that worry Duckworth about AI are the hallucinations and confidentiality concerns — issues that matter more to attorneys than most other professions and leave hesitant users with headaches over its ethical implications. Still, he says, it’s good to learn how to use it.

“I think there’s various reasons an older attorney may be hesitant to adopt it, but it seems like the attorneys I’ve spoken with, the ones that do lean on different AI tools, it really is just kind of a tool in their tool belt,” Duckworth said.

In an ideal world where AI has advanced past its current pitfalls, E.C. Duckworth’s dream tool would be adept at medical chronologies, something he currently doesn’t trust the technology to handle.

Slater’s dream AI tool would function like a young associate.

“I’m not interested in AI replacing personnel because I love working with people. I love building a culture in our company and in our firm and I really love practicing law,” Slater said. “So as long as I can do my job and do it with the people I love and get along with, then I’d love it to be a really substantial, solid tool to rely on, as opposed to a replacement for how we live our life day to day.”