Your clients come to you because of your very human expertise, experience, and ability to make personal connections. But they also love the instant responses, 24/7 presence, and predictive abilities that legal AI technology can give them.
If you want to wow your clients, use AI as your personal sidekick to emphasize your strongest traits and give clients everything they want.
That means letting AI handle the monotonous work so you can focus on doing what you do best — advocating for your clients. Routine tasks like document review and client FAQs might make your eyes glaze over, but your clients expect prompt, accurate delivery.
With AI taking care of the dull work, you'll have more energy to devote to the game-changing strategies and personal touches your clients will rave about.
You already know that happy clients lead to referrals and repeat customers. AI is the secret weapon you need to delight them at every turn. Whether it’s personalized reports, real-time updates, or best-in-class demands, you can use AI to give your clients an experience that exceeds their wildest expectations.
So get ready to bring on the bots and make your firm the stuff of client legend!
Here are 5 ways AI can help you delight your clients:
1. Translate legalese into plain language
To succeed in law school, you must adopt a rarified vocabulary and train your mind to think in particularly lawyerly ways. Those habits helped you pass the bar exam — but they can sometimes be an impediment when it comes to connecting with your clients.
When you’re deeply in the weeds of a legal question, you might not be in the best mindset to explain your work to clients in ways that they can understand and appreciate.
AI can help you cut through the legalese and make complex legal concepts more accessible.
Analyze legal documents, laws, and regulations to identify legal jargon and suggest simpler explanations and examples that are easy for non-experts to understand.
Generate visual aids like flowcharts and timelines to help visual learners.
AI contract review tools can quickly summarize contracts, explaining their key terms and provisions in simple terms.
Deep learning algorithms can also help translate between different languages, helping you serve a broader clientele.
2. Deliver faster service
So much of the practice of law is a waiting game. You can’t control how fast the courts operate or change the laws that allow opposing counsel a certain amount of time between steps.
But when the ball’s in your court, you can impress your clients by providing top quality legal products, such as demands, without wasting time hunting down the right clauses or scratching your head over the best wording.
Your average chatbot can’t deliver the high-quality legal documents you need. But a new generation of legal tools, like demands.ai, connects natural language processing systems, your case data, and legal experts who can review the results for quality assurance. With a human expert guiding the process, you can have greater confidence in the result.
Of course, you will still carefully review anything that AI creates. But it’s much faster to review and edit a strong piece of writing than it is to create it out of whole cloth.
3. Automate your routine and refocus your attention.
It’s clear that legal issues are becoming more complex. Take discovery for example. The amount of information lawyers have to sift through has grown astronomically.
Even just our daily lives generate more and more data that might be relevant for a legal case — consider emails, phone records, texts, social media posts, surveillance video, whatever our smart speakers overhear, whatever our smartwatches have to say about our location and heartbeat at a given moment.
It’s frankly impossible for humans to keep up. That’s what has made AI-powered ediscovery tools so popular.
I’ve written before about all the many ways AI can automate routine tasks and become your personal sidekick. But to ensure that this leads to more loyal and satisfied clients, you need to include another step. Take the time that AI saves, and carefully reinvest it in the work only you can do.
This includes higher-level legal strategizing, more active and thoughtful negotiation with other parties, and more personable communication with your clients. In this way, AI tools can let you be more human — and more beloved by your clients.
4. Provide more affordable services.
You might find that automation allows you to offer some services more affordably, such as reviewing contracts or drafting legal documents for clients. While large and complex legal issues will still require your time and attention, certain products and services may be more easily within reach of working-class people.
Perhaps it will become easier to help out at free clinics and provide other pro bono work.
Affordable, AI-assisted legal products and services could allow lawyers to help more people to start businesses, become citizens or documented residents of the countries where they reside, manage family and custody issues, and protect their rights as workers and consumers.
5. Know what clients want before they do.
The traditional experience with a lawyer is that clients seek them out when something becomes a problem, and just have to hope the firm can find time for them. But AI’s predictive and analytic capacities can turn that experience on its head, helping lawyers anticipate needs and questions before they arise.
For in-house counsel, these skills are particularly valuable. Helping your organization become proactive rather than reactive can save tremendous amounts of money and time. AI can analyze emails, intake forms, past legal documents and other client information so you can identify opportunities and see risks well ahead of time.
It can also be used to monitor changes in the law and legal landscape, so you can be the first to inform clients about latest regulations, court cases, and other changes in the law that will affect them.
Family and estate planning lawyers can use AI to track life events and milestones in order to anticipate services like prenuptial agreements, employment contracts, and estate plans that clients are likely to need.
The benefits of AI-boosted analysis go beyond your current clients, to your future clients. When you’re the first to understand the new lay of the land, you can attract new clients that the market is slow to serve.
By understanding changes in the law before your competitors do, you can offer inroads to those who are first affected by new case law or regulations, or who are taking advantage of new opportunities and industries.
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You have long relied on your experience and legal knowledge to deliver value to your clients. However, in the age of technology, clients expect more than just legal expertise — they want a seamless, convenient, and efficient experience.
With AI as your sidekick, you can automate routine tasks, analyze vast amounts of data, predict outcomes with greater accuracy — and in the end provide a better experience for your clients. Whether you're a solo practitioner or a large law firm, AI can help you take your legal services to the next level and leave your clients delighted.