Bahar Ansari co-founder of 2nd.law & Case.one.

 

Immigration attorney Bahar Ansari thinks one of the things that might surprise people about work in a virtual law firm is the quality of life. She's not speaking just from a to-do list perspective, but about the actual integrity of the legal work being performed.

After all, people—especially people juggling heavy caseloads—can make mistakes. So why not bring in a few robots? About 95 percent of the immigration practice at Irvine, California-based 2nd.law, the firm that Ansari co-founded with product designer Alex Pelevin, has been fully automated.

This means that she gets to focus on the practice of law while administrative items like billing are handled with an AI assist. Ansari's own journey towards automation started gradually with functions such as employee task-setting and evolved into more client-centric uses like signing documents, setting appointments or document collection. Once Ansari has completed a review, an automated process is kicked into gear that schedules a meeting with the client to discuss the case via the video-chat platform Zoom.

Ansari spoke with Legaltech News about the challenges of adapting to an automated environment and the savings that she's been able to pass along to clients. Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Legaltech News: What drew you to technology—specifically AI—as a potential solution to try and address some of these problems?

Bahar Ansari: I started out as a solo immigration attorney with my very own small law firm. I started scaling fast, and the law firm was scaling just from referrals from other clients only. And as it grew more and more I took on an assistant, but it really wasn't scalable past a certain point and I couldn't take on more clients and help them the way I wanted to with personal attention. And I had two choices: One was use some sort of technology to automate some of my work, two was hire more people.

At what point did you realize that technology had reached a level where you could realize that vision?

The last piece that was really missing was our AI-based bot, and we pushed that out last year. … The more workflows that I built, the more I realized that we can really automate anything. It's not just for the immigration practice area. It's really identifying a business process that's time consuming and building a logical, decision tree-based workflow with it…

In the beginning it was just workflows to automate a certain area of my own work on the backend, like the process of collection and reminders and task-setting for employees. And from there it grew into, 'Well, we can build an entire qualification chat-bot with it.'”

Can you tell me about the impact being able to automate all those tasks has on costs?

We've had up to 75 percent savings in our practice, and I decided to pass that on to our clients. So for example, an average O-1 visa would cost around $7,000 or $8,000 market price. At our law firm it's between $1,500 and $3,000. …

There is no overhead of a lot of employees. There's no overhead of office space. There are not a lot of papers. Your costs drastically decrease through automation.

When you first started working this way, what was the adjustment like?

It's still a new way of working. And this is the same challenge that a lot of companies and law firms face when you first introduce technology. It's getting the users to actually use it. That's where the value comes in. So on our end using it wasn't the biggest challenge… but it's the constant identification of where you can optimize the workflow more, because it's not a one-time build-out.

As you start working you realize, I used to do this work in five steps. Well now, I can change this design and do it in one step, so let me adjust the way I work. And change is always challenging in the workplace.

Have clients been comfortable with working that way?

Yes. When they first sign, of course, we have these conversations and they understand that the pricing has something to do with it, and that it's important for them to use the technology. We've been really lucky with out clients because they are also participating in this optimization process and they are providing us feedback. … For example, one of the latest feedback that we got was that it was taking too many steps to collect documents because we were collecting through a bot, and an upload process would be better. 

What do you think is preventing other firms or lawyers from pursuing automation more aggressively?

If you'd asked me this a few months ago I would have said may being conservative or being traditional or fear of change. But I think that the industry has changed a little—actually a lot—and I think that right now the challenge is finding the right technology. There's a lot of fragmented software out there. It's understanding what you need, how to build it out, and also if you're buying this fragmented software then you have to pay for development costs. And we're lawyers, we're not tech people. It's a big undertaking, it's a big cost and it's a lot of time.