Technology’s Effect on Advocacy
needs to review by hand. That is a meaningful shift in capacity, and it is happening inside firms right now, not on some distant roadmap.
Finally, weigh firm-wide adoption support. The most capable tool in the world provides no value if only one attorney in the firm knows how to use it. Ask what onboarding, training, and ongoing support look like after the contract is signed, not just during the sales process.
A Framework for Evaluating Legal AI Tools
Given how much is being marketed as "AI" right now, plaintiff firms need a clear-eyed way to separate genuine capability from a modern interface on old automation. A few questions are worth asking of any vendor. Start with practice area specificity. A tool trained broadly on general legal documents will not understand the difference between a nursing home staffing regulation and a trucking hours-of-service rule the way a system built specifically for plaintiff litigation will. Ask how the tool was developed and whether trial lawyers in your practice area were involved in shaping it. Data security, SOC 2 Type II, and HIPAA compliance are not optional line items. Medical records, especially in med mal and nursing home cases, are among the most sensitive documents a firm handles. Ask directly whether client data is ever used to train the underlying models, how the data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and what compliance certifications the vendor can produce, not just claim. Client data should never be used to train underlying models. This is a baseline standard, not a differentiator, that every firm should hold any vendor to. Case management integration matters more than it might seem at first glance. A tool that lives outside your existing workflow, requiring double entry or a separate login for every file, creates friction that undermines the time savings it is supposed to deliver. Look for genuine integration with the systems your firm already relies on.
What Comes Next, and Why Now Is the Moment to Act
Agentic AI in plaintiff litigation is still early, but it is not experimental. The firms adopting it thoughtfully today are building an advantage that compounds: more time spent on strategy and advocacy, less time lost to manual record review, and a clearer view of the facts that actually move a case. The firms that wait are not standing still by comparison. They are falling behind relative to firms that can review a case file in a fraction of the time and turn that saved time into better-prepared depositions, sharper demand letters, and more thorough discovery. In complex, high-value litigation, that gap tends to show up exactly where it matters most: in how well- prepared a firm is when the other side starts looking for weaknesses. Legal technology built for volume was never going to serve plaintiff firms well. Legal technology built for depth, applied thoughtfully and always paired with a lawyer's judgment, is a different proposition entirely. The question worth asking is not whether AI belongs in complex litigation. It is whether your firm's current tools are actually built for the kind of cases you handle, or whether they were built for someone else's practice and happen to work well enough for now.
56
Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM September/October 2026
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs