AI Meets Injury Law: How Technology is Reshaping Legal Practice

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This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Rusk Hi, Brown Welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me. Hey, thanks for being here. I appreciate you spending a few minutes with me today to tell our folks about what you're all about, what your story is all about on this.

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I know we connected through, uh, the great Dan Martell's, uh, mastermind group and, um, what a Yeah, certainly. I mean, for me, a guy like me used to running in, in the stale hallways of law firms, jumping into that group has been quite the Yeah, I bet. It's a little bit different. The temperature of To say the least, to say the least. Well, great to connect with you here.

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Um, on this, on this show specifically, I like to tell people's stories. So for context purposes, if we can back up a little bit to the beginning of the story, wherever the beginning of the story is, uh, for you, it's different for everyone. It really helped our listeners better understand where it all started, what brought you to present day with what you're doing as a personal Yeah. For me, the story really, it begins right at the beginning. I think I came out of the womb yelling, objection, your honor. I mean, it just, I knew from, I don't remember a time when I didn't know that I was going to be a lawyer.

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And that's probably because I've always admired my father so much. And he has been a lawyer my whole life, running a personal injury law firm. And I knew I wanted to go to work with my dad. So that was always the plan. And I just charged through life on that course always.

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But what I didn't anticipate was realizing that as good a lawyer as my dad was, what he was probably better at was actually just being a businessman. He's running a business, this law firm, a small personal injury law firm in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's, you know, it's just a business. And again, good lawyer, but great businessman.

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And I realized that kind of unconsciously I was cut out of the same mold. And, you know, as a teenager, I was cleaning pools and mowing lawns and just, I was doing things and started like a windshield repair company in college. And I realized that maybe I'm more of an entrepreneur than a lawyer even. But I liked the academic rigor of the law, and I love to talk a lot, and I like to argue, so law still made sense. But I needed to marry the two, entrepreneurship and law. And initially, the way I thought I did that was by going to work with my dad, eventually taking the reins there, and just doing side hustles that were totally unrelated.

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And I've done a bunch. And a lot of them were just probably horrendous distractions from my more profitable work. But some of them were fun. And I've invented a few things and have a few patents and have had some really small but modest successes in selling some of these young companies that I started on the side. And so anyway, all of this was kind of culminating. And my work in the law firm was sort of the rich uncle that paid for all of my other entrepreneurial adventures. And then, and then there came a threat, a threat to the law practice. Again, this is a 45-year-old law firm. It's called Nuttall, Brown, and Kutz, and Yeah, there you go. I know, you probably, I defy you to spell Nuttall or Kutz, and you can't, you can try, but you can't, and that makes it a great law firm. I think that's the true test of how good your law firm is, how few people could find it if they tried to spell it in a search engine. It makes a lot of sense from a marketing standpoint, too. So anyway, the thing is, it's always been the same. It's a traditional practice. It runs on a contingency fee. We don't get paid unless we win. We charge the same as everyone else. And there's very little market disruption in the space. And then we heard rumblings that the Utah Supreme Court had got this wild hair where They became convinced that the access to justice gap, which is basically the discrepancy between all of the legal needs that people have and the actual services that exist to meet those needs, there's a wide gap. It's like 92% of civil legal needs are unmet. And the court became convinced, I think it might have to do with the way we're regulating the practice of law. we're not allowing a true marketplace because we can't have non-lawyers delivering any kind of solution or service. We can't have non-lawyers participating even in the ownership structure of law firms. That's forbidden, which means there's no non-lawyer capital. There's no investment in the industry outside of what lawyers are doing just on our own. Also, they have really strict UPL requirements, unauthorized practice of law requirements.

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They also have, you know, there's a prohibition, like you can't, like, if you were to say, hey, Ty, I have a great pipeline, you know, of injured people that come to see me for whatever reason, maybe you fix cars or something. We couldn't partner up and find an arrangement. I couldn't share fees with you. That would be against the law. I'd be disbarred for that.

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So they have all these prohibitions that on the outward, they're actually called the rules of ethics, But oddly enough, instead of protecting like the interests of the public that we serve, mostly it just insulates lawyers from any sort of true marketplace competition, right?

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And the Supreme Court was like, we're going to try and experiment. We're going to set up a regulatory sandbox and we're going to just say, hey, submit an application, show us what you want to do. If we think it's going to be innovative and not hurt people, we'll allow it. And so we all panicked. We're like, we're all going out of business. Gravy train had come to an end and we were, I was scared. We were all scared.

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So we, I wrote this memo that was all about like, look at all this horrible stuff that's going to happen. And the practice of law is going to lose all of its credibility and people will suffer and die.

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I slept on it, we met as an executive team the next morning, and we all kind of reluctantly had independently concluded the same thing, which was, it is actually time to innovate, and we should not oppose this. We should lead the charge, we should improve our practice. So we came up with some ideas, and one of those ideas was ZAF Legal, which is this idea of, let's just open up the playbook to everyone, who's had an accident, we'll just give them all the information they could ever want or need to do it themselves. And we'll even tell them, hey, you might be better off without a lawyer in this instance.

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And by just opening up the playbook and giving them some self-help resources to even handle their case on their own if they want, we think we will earn their trust. And for those who have cases that we can make a big difference on, they'll trust us. They'll hire us. So that was kind of the gamble. And we set out to build an AI. Well, we first needed venture capital. So we got a non-lawyer partner to fund the development of a new you know, technology stack.

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I think we were the first non-lawyer venture capital investment in a law firm in the country, as far as I can tell. And And so anyway, we were off to the races. We were building an AI before OpenAI was even founded. We were so ahead of the game, but the problem was we're not really a tech company. And every time we went to launch something, it had already gotten passed. It was always a dinosaur before it was ever even released, because AI was just growing so fast. But anyway, we did our best. We've we launched an AI, basically legal assistant that helps people with their claims, helps them do their case on their own if they want. And it's gotten better and better with time. And now, yeah, we've helped hundreds of folks with their cases. And the vast majority of people that come through ZAF, they get a lot of information and guess what? They end up hiring us or our local, we have local, a nationwide network of lawyers that we partner with. And yeah, more often than not, they want a Wow, that's awesome. I mean, that reminds me of the old, Best Buy's Geek Squad strategy. When they were the first early adopters to YouTube, they would go on there and show you how to, in fact, fix your computer or to wire something in your house or how to set up a router. And I asked at a conference when one of the Best Buy or Geek Squad dudes was talking about this and telling the story, like, why would you give away all your secrets?" And he simply replied, because they're never going to do anything that we're teaching on the YouTube channel and they're going to call us. Maybe a small percentage will be, but there's a theory behind all of that. It's, you know, the whole idea of providing massive value, giving away all the secrets that aren't necessarily secrets, but are people actually willing to take the action and do the actual work? Or is it like, well, these are great resources, but let's just call them since they were nice enough to provide us with those resources and pay them to handle this. So I absolutely love that. That's a completely unconventional, different approach. Were you guys some of the first ones to ever do that in Yeah. As far as we can tell, as of today, there is no other company doing what we're doing with a consumer facing AI legal assistant that helps you handle your claim there. We are the only one. It Cool. Do you guys work with, I know you said you have a network of law firms to refer cases to and stuff, but like, what if you met an attorney in Miami and he was like, wow, this is really cool. I kind of heard about this before, but I had no idea where to start. Do you help people get started that way or other Yeah, I mean, we're adding to our attorney network all the time.

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And what ends up happening is if a ZAF user decides, yeah, I think I do want to turn this over. It's kind of like people have a hard time choosing a lawyer. It's actually a super stressful situation to be in because you're kind of vulnerable and you feel like you're going to get taken advantage of maybe. And when you have a medical problem, you go to your primary care physician, and they give you a referral. And that's where you go. And we're basically the starting place for these legal issues, right? And we're kind of a primary care provider. We're giving them kind of the highest level analysis of the case, sending them on to a specialist. So yeah, if an attorney wanted to partner with us, yeah, absolutely. I'd love. We're adding Cool. Yeah, I've got a guy in my networking group, my B and I chapter that him and his wife run a PI firm down here and do incredible work. I would love to connect. I would love that. Yeah.

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We'll, I think that would fall into the category of a strategic referral. Yeah. It's still, it's still good. Yeah. He's a, his name's Robert Ramirez. So I will definitely make that introduction.

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Uh, when, when, when we wrap up here today, wow, this is a, I, you know, all we hear to these days is AI, AI, AI, the robots have arrived and it's happening fast. It's only going to get faster. Have you thought about the role of an attorney and the courts and judges and cases and Yeah, I have a lot, actually. I sit on a working group commissioned by the Utah Supreme Court. It's called the AI and Technology or AI and Legal Technology Working Group. And the whole purpose of the group is we are studying, researching, and drafting recommendations on what the future looks like in law with AI, and more especially, how can it be regulated in such a way that it benefits the consumer? The goal of all regulation is to regulate in the public interest. And historically, law has been regulated more in the attorney's interest than the public interest.

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And so now we have this great opportunity with AI to take another hard look at regulation and say, how do we foster innovation so that AI can be a tool or a bridge over that access to justice gap? But we have to do it so that that bridge is not, you know, a bridge that just goes to nowhere or a bridge that's going to be dangerous or collapse or cause consumer harm. So, yeah, we're thinking really broadly about what can AI do. And there's basically two different roads that AI travels down in law. It's, number one, going to make law firms operate different. It's a tool for lawyers to be more efficient, presumably less expensive. to get more done. And that road is really crowded. It's very well traveled. There are tons of companies and there are hundreds of billions of dollars in legal tech invested on that road. Let's give law firms tools, right? But then there's the road less traveled, which is maybe the more uncertain one. which is, what if we put AI in the hands of everyday people? And what could it do for them? The reason it's less travel is it's more risky. We don't want people to get bad legal outcomes. We don't want them to get poor direction. But that's the road that ZAF is on, which is, hey, I think we can be a starting place for people. And if we have an AI that's built by lawyers, and linked to real lawyers, we can manage the risks of it. And I think that we will soon live in an age where AI and the law have intersected so hard that there is a pretty meaningful closing of the access to justice gap to where most legal needs can be met without a lawyer at all. And the truth is, it needs to get there. If it doesn't get there, then we don't solve the problem because lawyers have demonstrated over the last hundred years that we cannot pro bono our way out of this access to justice problem. So it Yeah. Wow, fascinating. I haven't even stopped to think about, of course, there's so many different facets that we haven't even started to wrap our head around pertaining to AI and what that all looks like. But the medical field and legal field have definitely been at the forefront of the conversation when it comes to disruption on a The reason it's so disruptive in law is because the primary skills needed for effective legal practice, well, I shouldn't say all of the primary skills. Some of the primary skills are consuming material, which AI is great at. And it's also writing, which generative AI is phenomenal at. Generative AI is extremely good at writing. And so when you can replace those two skills with a tool, It's a pretty big deal. I think Yeah. Well, it's going to be very interesting to see where it all pans out. That is for sure. Well, you're, uh, you guys seem to be ahead of the curve as much as you can get ahead of the curve when it comes to all of this. I literally have never had a conversation with an attorney, uh, let alone personal injury, uh, pertaining to how AI has intersected and improved your offering as a law firm. Number one, but number two, you know, leading with extending an act of service of saying, hey, we have tools and resources available where you probably don't need us. But in the event you do, we're here to help. I love both sides of that because that's a very tough argument for someone to have. Well, they want to help me.

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They want to give me a resource to help me. And if I don't take those resources, and they don't work for me, well, as a backup, I can hire them. So I love that you're doing work that matters, Ty. Well, man, it's been great to learn more about you. It's been great to meet you as well, too. That's why I do what I do. That's why I do podcast interviews, is to meet other great human beings like yourself. So I look forward to staying in touch. I really appreciate your time today, and I look forward to making that introduction to Robert. I think that his ears will definitely perk up. when he learns about this, if he hasn't already, the wheels have not already been spinning on here. Any final thoughts for Buckle up. Buckle up. No, it is going to be really fun to watch. We're living at a really cool point where we're all going to witness in our lifetimes a tremendous transformation in the practice of law. And the legal marketplace is changing. Other states are re-regulating. the rules of ethics are going to shift from protectionist to public interest pretty rapidly. And it's fun.

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For those who are interested in staying on top of legal news, these shifts in the marketplace, I'd invite anyone to check me out, follow me on Instagram. I share a lot of a lot of that playbook. Um, and I kind of do it in the style of, this is what I would tell like a first year associate lawyer, like the real nitty gritty, you know, how do you actually value a case? Like how do you, how do you arrive at a number on a settlement demand?

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Um, you know, so I'll share a lot of those things on my Instagram. You follow me at, at attorney underscore preneur and No, don't worry. We're going to put the link in the description of this podcast episode.

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For those of you listening here, make it easy for everybody. I definitely connect and reach out.

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to Ty. Ty, thanks again, my brother. I appreciate you, man. Thanks. Until Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, Launchlab.com Studios.