Where Is Your Firm Wasting Human Time?

If I could give everyone on my team five hours back every week, I'd do it tomorrow.

But saving time isn't really the goal.

I want our best people spending more time on the work we hired them to be great at. I don't want talented people spending hours every week on repetitive work just because that's how we've “always done it.”

I think law firm owners should be looking at AI the same way.

There are highly paid attorneys spending hours on work that doesn't require their level of expertise. There are people on your team doing the same repetitive task every day because nobody has stopped to ask whether there's a better way to do it.

That doesn't mean all of that work should suddenly be handed to AI - I know some of it shouldn't.

The question is where you can buy back human time without losing the things that make the human valuable in the first place.

At Array, we've taken it seriously enough that we built a Technology & Innovation team around it. We're looking at how work moves through the company, where we're wasting time, and where technology can make us more efficient.

Every hour we can responsibly give back to someone is an hour they can spend on work that actually needs them.

And that's where this gets more complicated than "use AI" or "don't use AI."

Some work benefits tremendously from speed.
Other work loses its value when you remove the person from it.

Knowing which is which matters.

Jason Goldman has found a pretty practical way to make that distinction.

Jason is a criminal defense and trial attorney based in New York who started his own practice about four years ago. When we talked about how he's using AI, what stood out wasn't how much he's using it.

It was where he's drawing the line.

Jason does a lot of appellate work, which can mean working through transcripts that are two, three, even four thousand pages long. He'll use AI to help identify issues or point him toward sections that may deserve extra attention.

But he's still going to read every page.

For legal writing, he'll use it to get a head start on a motion or work from templates he's already created. Then he reviews it, checks the cases, adds the specifics, and makes the final product his own.

He's not outsourcing his judgment.

He's getting to the part that requires his judgment faster.

And I think his approach becomes even clearer when you look at the work he won't hand over.

Jason handles criminal defense. A new client may be calling him at midnight because law enforcement is involved and they're experiencing the worst moment of their lives. That first conversation isn't just about collecting a name, phone number, and case information.

Sometimes he needs to calm the person down. He needs to understand what happened. He needs to explain what comes next.

That's part of being their lawyer.

So while Jason is happy to use AI to save time elsewhere in the practice, he doesn't want a robot having that first conversation for him.

& if you ask me, ithatt makes sense.

If I'm calling AT&T because my phone isn't working, give me a bot if it gets me an answer faster.

If I'm calling an attorney during one of the worst nights of my life, I want someone who is as real as what I’m faced with.

Every firm is going to draw that line differently. A high-volume PI firm may make a completely different decision about intake than Jason does, and that's okay.

The point isn't to use AI everywhere, but to know where your people's time is actually worth the most.

I think the firms that get this right won't necessarily be the ones using the most AI.

They'll be the ones that know where being human is worth the most.

Your attorneys should have more time for the work that actually requires an attorney. Your team should have more time for the things they're great at. And as the owner, you should have more time for the things only you can do.

That's what I want technology to give us.

Not fewer humans.

More human time spent where it actually matters.

Until next week,
Kevin

P.S. I'm curious where you're drawing the line inside your own firm. Where has AI given your team time back, and what are you keeping intentionally human? Send me a note at [email protected]. I'd love to hear what's working for you.

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