Can legal expertise become a chat feature? Soul searching in the age of AI

Like most steps, changes, transitions, works and businesses in my life, this article started with a conversation. This particular one started with a business progress review!

I name our firm and professional colleague here, but leave the gentleman I met at the courthouse unidentified. These reflections are my own.

Why were small criminal cases bringing in fewer inquiries?

About a year ago, through Medai Digital's technology and digital marketing services for law firms, we started working with Your Houston Criminal Lawyers.

The firm had decades of experience, cases, and accumulated knowledge. The expertise and legal authority were already there. Our work was to help connect that expertise with people who needed it. (You can read the firm's story and what we built together.)

Together, we started monitoring leads, conversations, and clients to understand where people were dropping out of the sales funnel, and how better technology and marketing could help.

Then we noticed something: inquiries about smaller, lower-fee cases, including misdemeanors, seemed to be shrinking.

Was this an issue with our firm? Should we adopt better policies? Were we doing something wrong? Or were we just a small node in a larger market shift, a change in demand we did not yet understand?

What did I see on a bench outside a Harris County courtroom?

So I tagged along with our lawyer friend, Sam R. Cammack III, to a Harris County courthouse. I wanted to observe, especially what was happening around misdemeanor cases, and find a clue behind those numbers.

By the way, I went there to build my own model of the court system, its demand and supply. Sam may already have understood things I was only beginning to see.

For much of the visit, I was a silent observer.

While sitting on a bench outside a courtroom, waiting for my ride, I noticed a few men nearby looking at their phones. They seemed stressed. One of them was speaking in Spanish to ChatGPT.

I could not understand the words. I do not speak Spanish. But I noticed the tone, the rhythm, and how his mood seemed to change as the conversation continued.

It felt warm. Almost intimate.

Here was someone sitting outside a courtroom, apparently afraid of what might happen next, talking to a machine. And from where I sat, he seemed to be finding some comfort.

I still have trouble wrapping my head around that moment. Did the AI have enough context to respond to the pressure he was feeling? Was it simply using a reassuring tone? I could not know. But the relief I thought I saw on his face stayed with me.

Afterward, I introduced myself. I explained that I had accidentally overheard some of his conversation, although I could not understand it, and that I was there trying to understand people's needs in the court system.

He seemed hesitant. Maybe surprised. Maybe I had crossed a boundary by asking. Looking back, that possibility matters too.

But he answered: "Tu madre!" Given I do not understand Spanish, I said thank you. Then he smiled and told me in English that he had been consulting ChatGPT about an alleged shoplifting case. As I understood him, he described it as a Class C misdemeanor, although I did not see his paperwork or verify the charge.

He said store staff had called the police, and that what the officers told him had frightened him: what the case might mean for his job, his record, his future.

Why would someone ask a chatbot instead of a lawyer?

Now he was asking ChatGPT whether what he had been told was true. He was also asking about the judge assigned to his case, the judge's reputation, and whether he needed a lawyer.

He was talking to Chat as if it were a lawyer he could turn to right there, on the bench.

I did not know whether the answers were accurate. I only knew he was using them to make sense of something frightening.

A few hours later, after more observing and waiting, I came across him again. I asked how things had gone and whether there was anything we could help with. I mentioned that I knew lawyers through our work and could connect him with a free consultation.

He said there was no need. The court had given him an appointed attorney, for free.

"Really? For free?" I asked.

He said yes.

I did not know the details of that appointment, or what would happen to his case afterward. Eventually, I packed my bag and left.

What does AI mean for lawyers who handle routine matters?

The following Monday, I shared the experience during a conversation with a lawyer client.

The conversation turned to something heavier: whether some younger lawyers, including those doing routine immigration work, were facing something like an existential crisis. Many smaller matters involve familiar procedures, established documents, and questions that come up again and again. We discussed why people might increasingly turn to AI for help with those parts.

That conversation also left me thinking about access to legal representation. The gentleman had told me he received an appointed attorney. I knew nothing about that attorney, the details of the appointment, or how his case would turn out.

What stayed with me was how little someone outside the legal profession may understand the system they have entered. Who has time for them? Who is responsible for them? Whose advice should they trust?

And now AI is becoming another voice in that conversation.

One encounter on a courthouse bench cannot explain our declining leads. I did not leave with proof of a market shift. I left with a possibility I could no longer ignore.

People may start turning to AI well before businesses recognize that anything has changed.

And I could not stop thinking that this may eventually reach the more senior lawyers too.

Can AI do what a lawyer does with case law?

There are legal talents deeply valued for their command of case law: knowing the relevant decisions, remembering a useful precedent, finding an argument that others missed.

As an outsider, I find that work fascinating.

A lawyer draws a connection between the client's situation and an earlier decision. The other side argues that the circumstances are different, or that the precedent does not apply. The skill involves research, interpretation, judgment, and knowing which similarities actually matter.

You may remember a dramatized version of that talent in Suits, especially Mike Ross and his extraordinary memory.

Of course, real law is more than a television character's memory. Still, I could not help asking: how much of this work might AI eventually do?

Searching through historical cases. Finding connections. Recalling details.

Memory, memory, memory...

Well, could AI have access to more of that than any one person?

Finding a case is not the same as knowing how to use it, or taking responsibility for a client's future. But even if AI takes over only part of the work, what happens to the person who spent decades becoming exceptional at that part?

Something cherished and highly paid may become a chat feature.

Just imagine what that fall from grace could do to a person.

Their soul might feel crushed. Or maybe they would feel they have to find a new soul.

What happens when your expertise fits in a box on everyone's phone?

I do not say this with excitement about somebody else's profession disappearing. I am a technologist. I build businesses around technology. These questions come back to me too.

What happens when something you spent years learning, something that gave you a place in the world, becomes available in a little box on everybody's phone?

There was something hopeful in that courthouse encounter. A man could ask questions in his own language, at the moment he needed to ask them. He seemed less alone.

There was also something unsettling. I did not know whether the comfort came with sound advice. And I could see how the same technology offering him relief might bring fear to someone whose livelihood depended on answering those questions.

Both feelings stayed with me.

How do we make AI adoption humane?

As I write this, I can feel a shiver of fear in my body. We humans need to find our soul, or at least keep it sane, in the age of AI.

And those of us who are business owners and technologists have to ask what we are building toward. How do we make AI adoption sustainable and humane? How do we help people through the transition, including the people whose expertise helped build the world we are now automating?

I went to court looking for a clue about leads and demand. I came home thinking about dignity, usefulness, and what happens when a person's place in the world starts shifting beneath their feet.

I do not have a finished answer.

But I want the technology we build to serve us, the people living through this change.

Or, as people in the street might put it, I do not want us simply serving "the System."

That strange system everybody talks about, where everybody thinks everybody else, except themselves, is part of it.

Do you get a free lawyer for a Class C misdemeanor in Texas?

Usually not, and that detail made me look again at what I heard on the bench. In Texas, a Class C misdemeanor is punishable by a fine of up to $500 and no jail time (Texas Penal Code 12.23), and there is generally no right to a court-appointed lawyer for fine-only offenses, although a court may appoint one when the interests of justice require it (Texas Code of Criminal Procedure 1.051). Theft of property worth less than $100 is a Class C misdemeanor (Harris County Managed Assigned Counsel); theft of $100 or more but less than $750 is a Class B misdemeanor (Texas Penal Code 31.03), which can carry jail time, and a person who cannot afford a lawyer for a charge that can lead to jail has the right to an appointed one.

I never saw his paperwork, so I do not know which it was. But the gap itself is the point of this story: a frightened person, a charge he may have named loosely, and a chatbot answering at the moment he needed it. That is exactly where a lawyer's judgment, and a firm that is easy to find, still matter.

This section is general information, not legal advice. If you are facing a charge in Texas, talk to a licensed criminal defense lawyer about your case.

What does this mean for law firms and lawyers?

It means the first conversation about a case may no longer happen with your firm. If people ask AI before they call, the firms that get the call are the ones AI understands and trusts. At Your Houston Criminal Lawyers, the firm's office manager reports that calls have doubled since we started, and about 60% now come from AI tools like ChatGPT. Demand did not disappear; part of it moved.

What we watch with the law firms we serve:

• Inquiries by case type, not only in total. A drop in smaller matters can hide inside a steady total. Count calls and signed cases by case type every month.
• What AI says about your firm. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI the questions your clients ask, in English and Spanish, and keep dated screenshots. Our AI visibility work does this every month.
• A page for every real question. People arrive with specific fears: their job, their record, their judge. One clear, lawyer-reviewed page per question does more than ten generic posts.
• A human who answers fast. Someone who already got an answer from a chatbot calls a firm to be heard by a person. Intake speed and tone decide whether that call becomes a client.
• Everything within the rules. Texas lawyer advertising rules apply to every page, review request and ad. We check each claim before it goes live, with the lawyer's sign-off.

When should a law firm not hire us for this?

When your calendar is already full of the cases you want, you do not need more leads. The same is true if smaller matters are fading and you planned to move away from them anyway. In both cases, keep your money: count calls and signed cases by case type for a few months, and call us only if the numbers tell you something is leaking.

What can a law firm do this month?

1. Split last quarter's calls and signed cases by case type, and compare them with the same quarter last year.
2. Ask three AI assistants who to call for your main case types in your county, and save what they answer.
3. Check that your Google Business Profile, directory listings and website tell the same, accurate story.
4. Write down the five questions clients ask on the first call, and make sure your site answers each one plainly.

If you want help with any of these, see how we work with law firms in Texas, read our law firm marketing roadmap or contact us for a free conversation.