Five Safe and Practical Ways Any Lawyer Can Start Using AI Today
When I left law firm life in 2022 to start a solo employment law practice, there was a lot of change and uncertainty. The practice grew quickly, which was wonderful—and overwhelming. In addition to lawyering, I had to manage administrative, non-billable tasks, including invoicing, collections, file management, scheduling, and marketing. I no longer had the benefit of the technology, staff, and other infrastructure my law firm had provided to help accomplish those tasks. There were more than a few moments when I questioned my decision to go solo and wondered whether I should hire someone to help keep my head above water.
Less than a year after I went solo, generative AI burst onto the scene. As a tech geek at heart and consummate early adopter, I immediately started experimenting. I quickly realized that this tool, while far from perfect, had incredible power and potential. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to harness its potential effectively and safely. It took some trial and error, but I’m now at a point where I have a solid set of refined, practice-specific workflows and prompts, allowing me to reclaim hours of my life. I can take on more work and do it in less time. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that AI has not only eased my administrative burden but also enhanced my substantive legal work, improving my ability to think, write, communicate, and strategize. Using AI hasn’t replaced my judgment; it’s optimized my bandwidth to use it.
Why would I want to use AI? It feels like more trouble than it’s worth.
You might be like a lot of attorneys who have excellent reasons to avoid incorporating AI into their practice. You might be perfectly content with the status quo. Attorneys are, by nature, creatures of habit. Many of us have built successful careers through careful adherence to procedure, consistency, and tried-and-true lawyering methods. AI, on the other hand, is unpredictable and confusing. Most people don’t know how to use it effectively, and most lawyers don’t have time to learn a new skill. And the options can be overwhelming! The legal tech market is overflowing with AI tools for legal practitioners that are expensive, appear to offer similar features, and lack a clear value proposition. It’s tough to differentiate between the options and to make informed decisions about whether and where to invest resources.
Not to mention, AI is inherently risky, whereas the legal profession exists to mitigate risk. Your license is governed by a comprehensive set of ethical rules, and there are serious open questions about the ethical use of AI. You have undoubtedly read the horror stories about lawyers getting sanctioned for filings containing AI-generated errors and hallucinated case law. You may not know how to protect attorney-client privileged and confidential client information. You might even be wary of AI precisely because of its ever-improving ability to mimic human intelligence, research, write, and reason. If a computer can already perform these functions faster and cheaper than humans, and gets better at them every day, what exactly can we offer? Can we be replaced? I get it — I’ve asked myself these same questions. So, it’s understandable that a lot of lawyers are crossing their fingers and hoping they can get to retirement age without having to use AI in their practice.
If you fall into the camp I just described, I’m here to tell you why you should reconsider, especially if you are a solo or part of a small law firm. The reality is that AI is here; it’s not going away, and it’s already changing the profession and the legal system itself. The lawyers who figure out how to harness AI to their advantage will survive and thrive. Whether you know it or not, legal professionals of every stripe – sole practitioners, law firms, in-house law departments, etc. – have already begun to address some of the legitimate risks I just listed and are putting AI to work to do better legal work, faster and more cost-effectively. So, while you’re probably not about to be replaced entirely by AI, you could be replaced by other lawyers who have figured out how to make it work for them. At a certain point, the bigger risk isn’t using AI—it’s ignoring it while your competition doesn’t.
The Good News
There is a lot of good news, actually. You can learn to use AI responsibly and ethically. You can use it to enhance your practice of law, not replace it. You don’t have to overhaul how you work. You don’t have to be tech-savvy. You don’t even have to invest a lot of money in a fancy tool. You probably already have access to enterprise-grade versions of these tools—like Microsoft Copilot through Office 365, or Gemini through Google Workspace.
Of course, BEFORE entering any client information, privileged work product, or sensitive data into an AI tool, make sure you read the terms and conditions and confirm that the tool is operating in a closed, data-secure environment. But even if you don’t have access to a secure, paid tool, you can begin to experiment using free tools to perform tasks that don’t require inputting any client or confidential information.
Five Practical Ways AI Can Enhance Your Practice - In Action
Here are five practical, free ways to get started, with linked examples showing how free AI tools can complete legal tasks in minutes. I used the same hypothetical scenario to create each of the following examples: A client asked for advice on the recent amendments to the Illinois Human Rights Act (“IHRA”) regarding employers’ use of AI to screen job applicants. Each demo below shows the full process from prompt to finished product in minutes — using free and publicly available tools — without disclosing the client’s identity or any of their confidential information:
1. Researching and Summarizing—Ask AI to research a legal topic, summarize a statute or regulation, or draft a memo analyzing how new legislation affects your clients. This works especially well for synthesizing key provisions from publicly available statutes and regulations. In this demo, I used Claude from Anthropic to research the AI amendments to the IHRA — no pre-drafted materials, no uploaded documents, just a question. I asked the tool to identify the relevant legal framework, summarize the key provisions, and organize the analysis into talking points I could take into a meeting with the client. I asked it to link to the statute, so I could verify that the memo accurately summarized the amendments. The entire process took minutes, not hours. Just remember: AI is a starting point for research, not a substitute for it. Always verify the law independently before relying on it.
2. Drafting— AI is great at generating a workable first draft. You provide the key terms, the applicable law, and the structure you want—and AI produces a starting point roughly comparable to what you’d expect from a first or second-year associate, in a fraction of the time. You still review, revise, and apply your legal judgment. But you don’t have to start from a blank page. In the next demonstration, I used Claude to draft a client-facing memorandum analyzing how the IHRA amendments would affect employers who use AI to screen job applicants. The resulting memo included a full statutory analysis, a comparison of enforcement frameworks, and practical compliance recommendations—all produced in a fraction of the time it would have taken to research and draft from scratch.
3. Revising and Refining—AI is also remarkably effective at improving drafts you’ve already written—or that the tool itself produced. You can ask it to tighten language, simplify complex provisions, restructure a document for readability, or reformat content into a different style. In the next example, after reviewing Claude’s first draft memo, I prompted the tool to refine the analysis, improve the organization, and strengthen the legal citations. Claude produced a revised version with tighter prose, clearer section headings, and better-integrated statutory references—all in minutes.
Click here to see the memo Claude produced
4. Brainstorming— One of the most underrated uses of AI — especially for solo practitioners — is as a thinking partner, as shown in the next demo. First, I asked if there were viable challenges to the law’s validity. Claude quickly shot me down, explaining why my theories didn’t work. Next, I asked Claude to help me help my client develop a compliance program to meet the new requirements. It’s the equivalent of walking down the hall to a colleague’s office and talking through a legal theory — except it’s available at midnight on a Sunday when you’re prepping for a Monday deadline, and doesn’t come with any of the embarrassment of asking a coworker what might feel like a dumb question.
5. Creating Templates, Checklists, and Workflows—AI can help you build repeatable processes for tasks you perform over and over. The research Claude conducted earlier indicated that if my client wants to continue using AI to screen job applicants, it must provide all applicants with written notice that complies with specific statutory requirements. As shown below, I used Claude to draft a template notice with all the required disclosures—identification of the AI tool, how it’s used, what data it processes, and how applicants can request accommodations. The result was a clear template ready for an attorney to review and edit.
Click here to see the revised template notice created by Claude
After I created the template, I remembered that a few of my clients use AI tools to screen applications and might want a similar template. So I created a reusable workflow — a saved set of instructions that tells the tool exactly how to handle a specific type of task, every time. After testing it with a hypothetical client, Acme Widgets, the tool asked me some additional key questions, taken directly from the statutory language, that I had neglected to include when I built the original workflow. So I told Claude to add those questions to the standard intaek process going forward. You're never locked into anything you build. You iterate and improve, just like you would with any other process in your practice. Now, the next time a client asks me to help them put together this type of notice template, I can trigger the workflow in Claude, answer a series of simple questions, and voila! I will have an IHRA-compliant template notice tailored to that specific client — in minutes, not hours.
These demonstrations show what you can accomplish with tools available to anyone right now, at no cost. But there are countless additional valuable use cases worth exploring as you get more comfortable with AI. Your imagination is the limit!
A Word on Ethics: Do Not Trust, Always Oversee, Always Verify
All of this comes with an important caveat: the rules of professional responsibility apply to the use of AI in law, just as they apply to any other technological tool you have integrated into your practice. You need to be thoughtful about what information you put into AI tools, which tools you’re using, who is using them, and what you do with the output. AI remains unpredictable and can be unreliable. If there’s one thing you take away from this post, let it be this: never file, send, or rely on AI-generated content without independently verifying that it accurately states the law and facts. AI tools can and do hallucinate. This isn't a rare glitch; it's a known feature of how these models work. Take the time to double-check.
I’ll be writing more on the ethics of using AI in legal practice and other thorny AI questions in future posts. In the meantime, I’ve created a simple, one-page checklist that covers the essentials—what to do, what not to do, and how to protect yourself and your clients from the start.
Questions?
I can help solo practitioners and small law firms safely and effectively incorporate AI into their legal work. Feel free to reach out with any questions.
jenny@goltzemploymentlaw.com
