Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
Firms looking to automate their practice without losing authentic client engagement should focus on the boring parts, a principal lawyer has shared.
The em dashes, repetitive phrasing, and abrupt full stops are wearing thin for clients who deserve real engagement with their lawyers, but that does not mean firms need to abandon automation altogether.
At Zed Law, generative artificial intelligence works because it has been built to preserve a genuine lawyer-client relationship, principal Nandan Subramaniam said ahead of his session at next week’s Clio and Lawyers Weekly’s “(Almost) everything law school didn’t cover” free live stream.
“Clients hire lawyers because they want a human making a judgement call on something they can’t afford to get wrong. If your AI is the thing answering their email, drafting their advice, and following up, you’ve removed part of the service they were paying for in the first place.
“Clients can read. If your engagement email opens with ‘I hope this finds you well’ and has three em dashes in the first paragraph, bolded words, colons, they know exactly what happened, and they quietly assume the advice underneath was written the same way,” he said.
Rather than interfering with the services that encourage a positive client relationship, Zed Law has automated tasks like intake forms, file structures, invoicing, CRM updates, and payment reconciliation.
“Automate the parts no one would ever brag about. Leave the rest alone,” Subramaniam shared with Lawyers Weekly.
Any external collateral, including social media posts, remains human-led, as do direct messages practitioners use to engage with their clients. As for emails, the firm uses a tool that creates a first draft based on voice and previous communications to deliver tone, strategies and positions that have been applied in similar cases.
Zed Law also has an internal RAG model that allows practitioners to synthesise firm knowledge, thoughts and views in order to build material and organise. Subramaniam said it helps busy lawyers engage in marketing and admin without taking away from their legal work.
By sticking to these strategies, Zed Law has avoided falling trap into the mistakes Subramaniam said he has been seeing, like the “five LinkedIn posts a week no one reads because they all sound the same”.
“AI doesn’t make you authentic. It just gives you more time to be.
“At Zed Law, we’ve automatised around 80 per cent of our operations. The point was never to replace lawyers. It was to free them up so they could actually pay attention to the client in front of them. Less time on administrative work and more time on the work that matters.
“That way we stay authentic,” Subramaniam said.
Hear more from Nandan Subramaniam and other experts at Clio and Lawyers Weekly’s “(Almost) everything law school didn’t cover” next Wednesday, 3 June. Register for the free livestream here.
