Technology’s Effect on Advocacy
guarantee. Every cite in every piece of work product requires human eyes.
The model has no tactical instinct. It will draft a meet-and-confer that reads technically complete but strategically toothless. The judgment about when reasonableness serves you and when it does not still belongs to our team. To a large extend, I suspect it always will. Finally, cross-matter pattern recognition needs improvement. The prompt "have we seen this defense before, and what worked" is still early. The exemplars are there, but the retrieval against unfamiliar fact patterns is uneven.
A Pitch To Build, Not Buy
This is not a pitch to buy something. This is a pitch to build something — specifically, your foundation which any good AI product needs, but it cannot provide it for you. The leverage in plaintiff-side AI is not in the model. The model is a commodity, and getting more so. The leverage sits in the structured exemplar layer underneath: the prior briefs, the prior complaints, the demand letters that actually closed, and the redlines between the AI's first draft and the fifth version that survived attorney edits: organized, tagged, and indexed so a tool can search and retrieve information appropriately and efficiently. No vendor can build that exactly for you because no vendor has your work product. No vendor thinks about and approaches problems the way you, your partners, and paralegals do. For firms with a deep file room, the work means structuring what already exists. For firms still building one, it means doing both at once — producing exemplars and structuring them as you go. Either path
takes real work. Either path sits within reach. If you have been wondering how to make AI useful in your practice, the question is not always which product to buy. It can instead be: what does your firm's structured knowledge layer look like — and would you rather build it or hand the keys to someone else? The patterns are not proprietary. CAOC could be where this conversation happens. We already share trial strategy — experts, venues, judges. We can share patterns for building and running these tools the same way, without sharing the work product itself. Five hours for a sheet of pleading paper was the price of treating the foundation as somebody else's job. The job belongs to us. Six weeks in, my firm runs differently than it did. I want the next six weeks, and the six after that, to belong to the plaintiff firms that decide the same thing.
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Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM September/October 2026
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