Why You Can’t Afford to Wait to Adopt AI Tools that have Plaintiffs Moving Faster than Ever
Just as photocopiers shifted law firm operations in the early 1970s and cloud computing transformed legal document management in the early 2000s, AI automation tools are altering the current legal landscape—enabling litigation teams to instantly structure unstructured data, zero in on key arguments in seconds, and save hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of manual work.
So far, plaintiffs have been the first to widely adopt these tools, leaving defense litigation and claims teams struggling to keep up—still fully dependent on human labor as the legal talent pool shrinks. If your team is already suffering consequences like surges in volume that overwhelm your resources, lost focus to time-consuming distractions, turnover among your staff, and missed details or deadlines, maintaining the status quo isn’t an option.
Learn the 5 biggest risks of waiting to automate your processes, and how to mitigate them with tools that can match and outpace the opposing side.
PITFALL 1
Being Crushed by Caseloads
Plaintiff-side AI tools make it easier and more cost-effective than ever before to generate a high volume of claims. As plaintiffs use automated processes to file cases and claims at ever-increasing volumes and speeds, too many defense law firms, insurance companies, and other corporate legal departments find themselves flooded with work, their teams weighed down by crushing caseloads.
Under pressure to keep costs in check and keep pace with litigation and claims demands, defense teams can’t afford the time to find and onboard new resources or the budget to retain them. Meanwhile, plaintiff-side automations create additional busy work for overstretched defense lawyers to respond to, causing distractions that take their time away from more impactful work.
When California Lemon Law cases doubled for one of the largest global automakers in 2024, they used LegalMation to automate discovery responses. As a result, they reduced their response time to thousands of requests by at least 50%, diminishing the need to increase headcount for their outside counsel.
PITFALL 2
Failing to Keep Up with Surges in Volume
When relying on manual processes for high-volume litigation and claims, a sudden surge in claim volume can prompt panic, delayed responses, and poor decision-making among defense-side teams.
The “domino effect” after that first point of failure can look like:
- Missed deadlines
- Missed arguments and defenses
- Compromised client relations
- Lost business
The best way to prevent this “domino effect” is to ready your team to handle any increase in claim volume before it hits, ensuring you can respond to litigation and claim demands at speed and scale without adding headcount.
By automating their processes using an AI agent trained on their specific guidelines, preferences, and approach to litigation and claims, users save up to 80% of their teams’ time, so they can always respond at the speed of the opposing side—no matter the volume of claims coming their way.
PITFALL 3
Over-hiring & Budget Strains
Some defense teams running on manual processes opt to hire up when they experience a spike in claims or litigation demands. Before using automation, a large insurance carrier began hiring across all functions when it received a significant increase in new auto cases. Instead of solving their problem, adding headcount created new ones, like:
- Lost time spent training new hires on their specific processes
- Slowed responses to claims litigation demands
- A lack of consistency in work quality across the team
- Significantly increased expenses, particularly in overtime pay
The company also knew that any decrease in claim volume would lead to untapped capacity among all those new hires, and they would have to make difficult decisions like layoffs as a result.
By adopting automation, they were able to automate the creation of answers, requests for the production of documents, interrogatories, requests for admissions, and deposition notices—all tailored to the facts and allegations of each complaint and almost indistinguishable from those created by the insurance company’s attorneys and paralegals. Best of all, they could generate all these types of output in 2-3 minutes, requiring minimal time from attorneys to finalize them. Now, when they experience a surge in volume, they know they can handle it without any additional resources needed.
PITFALL 4
Missing Deadlines
For lawyers, missing deadlines is the #1 cause of malpractice claims. Regardless of the volume of cases or claims your team must handle at once, the stakes of meeting your deadlines for any single case are high. Consequences of missed deadlines can include:
- Dismissals
- Sanctions against lawyers
- Waiver of certain claims and defenses
And of course, the best way to avoid these consequences is to work through your caseloads as quickly, thoroughly, and efficiently as possible. Teams that use automation can work exponentially faster at discovery, data extraction and organization, document summarization, and end-to-end drafting without sacrificing work quality, ensuring that they can easily meet deadlines, keep pace with plaintiffs, and avoid time-consuming distractions.
PITFALL 5
Increased Risk of Human Error
The legal work completed by humans is innately inconsistent. Each lawyer has their own distinct style, and the quality of work will vary among team members based on their skills and experience. This inconsistency only amplifies as litigation and claims volume increases, particularly when lawyers and paralegals are overwhelmed and under pressure, which can cause their work quality to suffer.
As the plaintiff side has already learned, AI models can provide highly consistent work quality once properly trained. Plaintiff lawyers who use AI and practice in high-volume areas can even generate higher quality and more consistent work products than human lawyers can—and at a far greater scale.
But, it’s possible for defendants to close the gap by adopting the right tools. Automation users across law firms, corporate legal departments, and insurance companies find that the documents created for them are almost impossible to distinguish from the best work of their own lawyers and paralegals.
CONCLUSION
Plaintiffs are disproportionately benefitting from the force multiplier effect of AI tools to help lawyers generate a high volume of high-quality documents, increase the consistency of their output, and move through cases faster than ever before. But, the tools are available to help high-volume litigation and claims defense teams regain their competitive edge.
When you use automation, you can customize a solution using your own best prior work samples and key company data to train your AI models—so you can generate work that’s consistently top quality, in a fraction of the time it used to take. And, by getting through work 80% faster, your team can save their attention to the highest-impact tasks, and avoid these pitfalls.
