How Bighorn Law Uses Filevine AI to Win Faster (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being here today. We're so excited to chat with you more about your experience at Bighorn Law, as well as your experience with Filevine. To start, why don't we just hear a little bit more about you, your time at the firm, and then we'll talk about the Filevine journey, of course.

[00:00:13] Speaker 2: Yeah, so I wanted to be a trial lawyer since I was a little girl. I think I was like 11 or 12, and I read this book called The Chamber by John Grisham, totally not age appropriate. My dad gave it to me, I think, as a way of getting me to maybe leave him alone a little bit. But I read it as much as I could understand it, and I knew that I wanted to be an attorney from there, and that was all that I ever wanted to do.

[00:00:35] Speaker 1: That's funny. He's been on a short list for us to bring out to Lex, as many of our Filevine employees are John Grisham fans. Of course.

[00:00:43] Speaker 2: But maybe not as young as you. You might have been the earliest start. It was probably my first adult book that I ever read, and it's a really kind of horrific story. It's a death penalty case, and so I thought for a long time I would do criminal defense work, and obviously I had to pivot at some point in my life and ended up doing personal injury.

[00:01:00] Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about your journey to Bighorn. What were you doing prior? What do you do there now?

[00:01:05] Speaker 2: So like I said, I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney my first year of law school. A friend of mine was killed on his motorcycle, and I just happened to end up between my first and second year of law school at the firm that was handling his wrongful death case. And so that really completely changed my worldview. I didn't really understand or know personal injury until then, and it just completely changed everything in the trajectory of my career. And so when I went back to law school my second year, I knew that the only thing I would do is personal injury, that that was where my heart was. Now I started law school in the fall of 2008, which was a really terrible time to do a lot of things in the USA. And so when I started law school, the market crashed, and it was just really hard to get jobs in general. And so out of law school, the market was still not really great. I ended up getting a job at an insurance defense law firm in Nevada, right outside of Las Vegas in Henderson, Nevada. And I had never been to Nevada. I'd never been to Las Vegas. I was going to school in a small town in Georgia. So it was a huge transition for me. So I took the job. I went out there, and I was doing insurance defense for two and a half years before transitioning over to Bighorn, where I've done exclusively plaintiff side personal injury since 2013.

[00:02:15] Speaker 1: How did your experience at the insurance defense firm fuel your work at Bighorn, being on the other side then?

[00:02:24] Speaker 2: So I would say, you know, I didn't want to be an insurance defense lawyer. It was really just a matter of, like, there was nothing else to do. There were no other jobs. And so I took the job that was available, and I was so grateful to have work because so many of my classmates didn't have work coming out of law school. And so I loved it. I wanted to do car crash cases. I was really blunt, you know, even in my interview. Like, I want to do personal injury plaintiff side. But it was helpful, for sure, transitioning over to the plaintiff's world, because I understood I had worked with insurance companies. I understood, of course, how they evaluated cases, how they did things. But I'll be really honest, Keegan, it has been, what, 12 and a half years now. It's been a very long time since I've done that type of work.

[00:03:04] Speaker 1: Got it. So let's talk a little bit about your career journey, because it sounds like you were pretty young starting out at Bighorn, and now you're the CEO. Let's hear more about it.

[00:03:12] Speaker 2: Yeah, so I actually, I graduated from law school and started practicing law at 23. So I had the benefit of just starting my career very young and going all the way through. So now I joined Bighorn as just an associate attorney and kind of worked my way up. And I made partner in 2017 and stepped into the role as CEO in 2020, and I've really been more on the business side than the practicing side since 2020, although I do still handle a small caseload.

[00:03:42] Speaker 1: Well, congratulations. That's a really exciting career journey, and obviously was not easy. It sounds like you start things early, whether it's reading John Grisham books or joining the law practice.

[00:03:52] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been a crazy ride, but I'm so grateful to be where I'm at.

[00:03:57] Speaker 1: So Jackie, you've been at Bighorn about 12 years. I assume there have been a ton of organizational, operational shifts that you've gone through. Are there any most memorable that are worth talking about here?

[00:04:08] Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Okay. So yes. When I started at Bighorn, there was maybe 10 of us total. There were only, I think, four attorneys total and maybe 10 of us. We could all fit in this really small conference room for our Friday morning meetings where we were all together. And watching it now, we have, I believe, 92 people on our team, and it's been an incredible amount of growth over the last 12 years. But so much of that, of course, has come with a lot of growing pains. Some of the big moments, of course, I remember the first day we implemented Filevine. Back then I was just an associate attorney, so it was quite literally like we were on a different platform and one day I came into work and it was a rip the Band-Aid moment. Now we're on Filevine. No heads up, no warning, which was in hindsight, I mean, it was like terrifying in the moment, but in hindsight was actually really good because it required us all to adapt really quickly. Think of it as like the equivalent. Nobody likes when Facebook does an update and everything is different, but they don't like warn you about it. It just happens and now you have to live with it and you just adapt and get used to it. Of course, getting through at that time, you know, in Vegas, we're still in the height really of the recession and then all of the growth that happened leading up to the pandemic and then, of course, all of the pandemic and everything that happened, which when the courts were closed, you know, we were in court in the first week of March of 2020 and we did not do another jury trial until the end of September of 2021. And so as a trial law firm, that was really catastrophic and, but yeah, so many changes in different chapters over the course of the firm, but I'm grateful for all of them because you have to go through all of those things to get to where you are and to really appreciate the good place that you're in.

[00:05:53] Speaker 1: Yeah. I think about all of, it sounds like you not only were facing kind of uncontrollable change through the world we were living through, but then also going from 10 to 92 at the same time. Yeah. So you ripped the Band-Aid off when you first tried FileVine. How about as you've scaled, is that a new higher onboarding you all do or how do they learn about FileVine out of the gates?

[00:06:14] Speaker 2: So I think that, you know, it's interesting, an interesting dynamic now because so many times when we're in interviews with new team members, they've actually already used FileVine, which is so cool to have people that are already familiar with the program. That of course does come with some downsides though, because the way that they use FileVine might not at all be the way that we want them to use FileVine or the way that we use FileVine within our office. And so we do interview for it right at the very beginning. And then yes, there are a lot of ongoing trainings that happen. And I really believe that if you're going to be successful in using the software within your law firm, it's important that you continue to implement and continue to talk about the ways that the software should be used to suit your organization.

[00:06:56] Speaker 1: It's so interesting to hear they're using it other places, but I can imagine with how configurable it is, they come in and they say, my FileVine looked like this. Yours looks like this. Where do I find this? Yes.

[00:07:06] Speaker 2: But not only that, it's also that, well, at my old firm, we named documents this way, whereas we have very specific document naming conventions so that we can always find things. And so breaking some of those bad habits, or not necessarily bad habits, but those things that they come into our organization with and making sure that they're readjusted to what we're doing is important.

[00:07:25] Speaker 1: So at what point did you realize the traditional way law firms were operating wasn't going to work anymore? So it sounds like you were maybe on old software or maybe other systems.

[00:07:36] Speaker 2: Yeah. So my last year, my insurance defense firm, so this was in 2013, I think it was early 2013, we were on a server-based system and we actually had a crash, or like a cyber attack. I don't really know exactly what happened because we were completely in the dark. What I mean by completely in the dark is like we were not even allowed to turn on our computers. And what was crazy about that lasted about a week. And at the end, we still all had to make our hourly billing requirements. So I could not send an email, I could not access any files, like I couldn't even access a calendar. All of that was broken for about that week time period. And so I think that when we look at software, it's so important to stay on top of what is new and what is actually working. So when I transitioned from my old firm to where I was at with BigCorn, it was such an incredible transition to go from a server-based platform over to a cloud-based platform. Because now, instead of like, I don't know if you remember this, Keegan, but we used to have to like remote in where you would take your laptop and you would like log in to your desktop that was sitting at your desk and mirror the computer and it was so abysmal and slow. So now to have this system where you can really be anywhere in the world and work. I mean, there was a year or summer I did a Baltic cruise of the Baltic Sea for 14 days and it was so awesome because I could do everything that I needed to do from wherever I was. I've done it like, you know, I just spoke and mentioned that I love going to Spain. I've worked from Spain, any other country, you can work anywhere. And that ability to really be on the go, especially in today's world where so many of our depositions are not only in other states but sometimes in other countries and where we're having to go and to meet clients where they are, it's so important to stay nimble.

[00:09:21] Speaker 1: Yeah, I can imagine just that transient-ness of the business now. Even just being in your car, hopefully not driving while you're doing this, checking up the last few details on a case and then heading into trial, I mean, you couldn't have done that before.

[00:09:35] Speaker 2: No, we couldn't have. Yeah. And the ability, I mean, now when we sit in a courtroom, you know, we have our full file in front of us sitting on our laptops. We can access any document. We can search through any document. We can chat with our case about any particular thing. And for a team of very competitive trial lawyers, that's incredibly important.

[00:09:55] Speaker 1: I think that's an interesting concept you just brought up is this idea of chatting with your case. I've heard from other attorneys, you know, it used to be you'd have almost your binder of everything and you're looking as fast as you can as the trial's going on. How has implementing a tool like Filevine's AI helped you in that trial setting?

[00:10:13] Speaker 2: Boy, there are so many cool things that we've discovered with the AI. And I'll be honest, there are so many features that I feel like I haven't even had a chance to really tap into yet because I've been so amazed by the ones that I have discovered. So sitting in trial, I mean, the ability to chat with your case. For example, most recently I was preparing a client for deposition and one of the questions that came up was, was there any kind of testing for marijuana use? And that was what I wanted to try and find out. And I had a very finite amount of time to get that answer. And so all I did was simply chat with the case. Is there any reference to a test for cannabis use? And it was able to tell me, yes, it happened on this day and it was negative. To be able to pull that type of information that quickly is so invaluable when we're trying to move quickly and to get to an answer as fast as possible.

[00:11:03] Speaker 1: So I assume before, Jackie, what you would do is pull up all your documents and try and do a search for some kind of keyword and hope to find the page?

[00:11:10] Speaker 2: And just hope.

[00:11:11] Speaker 1: Yes. So just sit back in the binder, flip to page, whatever it is, and hope to find something. So while we're on the topic of AI, let's talk about some of the other things you've tried that you said you had a few favorite features. Okay. I'm obsessed with the MedCrons.

[00:11:26] Speaker 2: Okay. So one of my jobs now I'm in, I do handle a very small caseload, but one of the things that I do every week is I do what are called weekly case reviews. So I'm sitting down with all of our pre-lit team, every single one of them, at least once a week. And so I do about 10 of these a week where we're going through and we're round tabling different clients' cases. And that's important for me to do as a supervising or managing partner with a lot of experience at this point and making sure that the cases are being handled properly, that we're in the right direction, that the clients have everything that they need. And having the ability to quite simply click a button and be able to generate a MedCron that is hyperlinked with the individual medical records is so invaluable. It's allowed me to go from taking hours of time to maybe evaluate a set of medical records to with a click of a button I can make a decision and we can pivot on a case or make a handling decision within a matter of minutes because I can identify the record that I need, open it up and look at it and verify the information so quickly.

[00:12:29] Speaker 1: I just think about how many case reviews you can do then versus what you may have had to set aside time for in a week.

[00:12:35] Speaker 2: We were in trial recently on this really sad case with a client who was improperly discharged from a hospital and then was just left in the waiting room. Ended up going all the way to verdict. We got a great outcome. But a lot of what was coming up as we were going through the preparation cycle was we needed a really precise timeline on exactly what time certain things happened. And a lot of that is documented within the medical records, but that's obviously very difficult to go and find individual time stamps within thousands and thousands of pages of medical records. And in this case, with this particular client, because the aftercare was so extensive, it was even tens of thousands of pages of medical records. And so utilizing the chat with my case, I can go ahead and I can find, build me a timeline of exactly when this person met with a particular nurse, when they were discharged, what time they left, what time they were seen by a hospital. Utilizing that type of information was so valuable in helping us prepare for that trial.

[00:13:33] Speaker 1: Is there anything that folks on your team or, you know, maybe up and coming attorneys have shown you with the AI that they've used?

[00:13:41] Speaker 2: Yes. So I was out on maternity leave when we adopted the depositions by FileVine. And so watching the team utilize that for help generating questions and making sure that they haven't missed any information has been really, really cool to see. And then also, I think that we really started using a lot of the chat with my case when I was out on maternity leave. And we have so many really young team members that have done a good job of utilizing the technology and even teaching us how to use it. And I've enjoyed watching them kind of dig into it and develop it out.

[00:14:12] Speaker 1: I've seen that with a lot of teams is, you know, younger attorneys who are understanding the business are actually teaching the rest of the firm new ideas or new ways of leveraging technology or AI that I hate to say it, maybe you or I wouldn't think of if we're not in the weeds all day. And so that's where some of the coolest ideas have come around, like iterations of our product as well.

[00:14:33] Speaker 2: You're exactly right. And we actually – we just hired an attorney who told me afterwards that he was – he had learned that I was 23 when I passed the bar and he was 23 when he passed the bar. And so we have a very young set of attorneys who are brand new in their career and who come with a wealth of knowledge on the technology side that I think I am – you know, as we get older, we just are not as good at staying on top of that kind of stuff. And so it's been really fun to watch them even teach us how to use this new technology.

[00:15:03] Speaker 1: Yeah, I think about the questions they may be asking versus you or I may ask, chat with your case, right, because they've always had access to it. When you're thinking, how do I make this easier than looking through a binder or looking through my server from years ago?

[00:15:16] Speaker 2: One of the coolest things that I've seen really develop with Filevine over the years, when we first got Filevine, there were no docs. There was no uploading a document into a file. This is a true story. We would get like the description of it and then I would copy and paste that description into our Dropbox to then find that document to read it. And then I'd go back to Filevine and make my note. And so watching this evolution of uploads happen and then how many uploads you guys are getting every single day is crazy at this point. But then watching the way that you guys have developed OCR within the records and every – I mean, it's incredible. One of the things that we did most recently is we had this issue come up in a case where a demand letter was sent to a particular fax number. And there was this dispute over whether the recipient of that fax received that fax and why we used that particular fax number. And they claimed, just for a little bit of background, that that was not their fax number and we shouldn't have used it. And so one of the coolest things that I did recently is I just typed that fax number into our deep search. Now, you know, we have documents going all the way back to 2014 in our system. And so when I typed that in, I found 14 different cases where that fax number was provided by that same recipient as their official fax number. And of course, you can imagine that was incredibly valuable to then have and produce as evidence in that case.

[00:16:38] Speaker 1: So there's a lot of firms that aren't as forward thinking as Horn Law is, but what advice do you have for law firms that are maybe a little hesitant to adopt maybe new technology or AI in their firm?

[00:16:50] Speaker 2: I think that in the personal injury world, it's so important that we all remain very nimble. We are against insurance companies that have so much money, large corporations like Uber that continue to throw tons of money at tort reform. And so it's important on our side that we continue to be incredibly nimble. We have to keep investing in new technology to benefit our clients. It is literally the best thing that we can do for our clients to make sure that we always have the cutting edge. If you are a personal injury firm and you are out there and you are not doing these types of things, and if you are not going and obtaining the latest technology, you're simply doing a disservice to your client. There are ethics rules in place now that say what we need to do as attorneys to remain competent and staying on top of the technology is one of those things. And staying on top of AI is one of those things. We have to continue to adapt. We have to continue to try new things. And personal injury lawyers are really in the very best situation. We have no big corporate client that to answer to. We get to make the decisions and to do truly what's best for our individual clients every single day. And I would encourage anybody who is on the fence about this to explore the different types of products that Filevine has out there. You will completely transform not only your practice, but also, more importantly, the lives of your clients.