Chris Schwegman is becoming creative about how artificial intelligence is used in the law.
At Lynn Pinker Hearst & Schwegman, a Dallas-based boutique law firm, he sometimes asks AI to guide Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts or Sherlock Holmes.
After uploading the brief of the opposing advisor, Schwegman asked legal technology platform Harvey to assume the role of legal mind like Roberts, saying he would see how the Supreme Court judge thinks about certain issues.
He also turns to fictional characters like Holmes, unleashing different frames of mind.
“Harvey, Chatgupt… they know who those people are and can approach the problem from that perspective,” he said. “Once we step out of our lane as lawyers, we can engage more creatively in other areas of science, literature, history and mythology, and sometimes we can use appropriate legal judgments to generate the most interesting ideas within the framework that functions to solve legal issues.”
This is just an example of how small and medium-sized businesses are working to make AI punch beyond their weight, and new data shows that there will be far more implementation opportunities in the future.
Only 24% of the owners of the National Federation of Independent Enterprises’ recent SMEs and Technology Survey said they were using AI in some capacity, including ChatGpt, Canva and Copilot.
In particular, 98% of people using it say that AI has not affected the number of employees in a company so far.
At a litigation company with 50 lawyers, Schwegman said AI was working to resolve the work in days that took weeks, and that the technology would not replace the company’s workers.
It freed the associate lawyers from “groaning,” he said. It also means that more senior-level partners have time to mentor young lawyers as everyone has more time.
NFIB research found that AI usage differs depending on the size of small and medium-sized businesses. For businesses with single-digit employees, 21% of them were able to capture. In companies with over 50 workers, AI implementation was almost half of all respondents.
“The data clearly shows that ingestion into the smallest companies is quite behind the larger competitors… with a little more attention from all involved stakeholders, a more level playing field is possible,” the NFIB report states.
Regarding future AI use, 63% of all small employers surveyed said that technology use in the industry will be important to some extent over the next five years. 12% said it was very important, while 15% said it was not important at all.
Some of the most common uses in the survey were communication, marketing, advertising, predictive analytics and customer service.
“We still have the need for independent legal judgments of the relevant lawyers and partners. It’s not replacing them, it just augments their thinking,” Schwegman said. “It makes them more creative and gives them the freedom to spend time with lawyers doing their best. It’s strategic thinking and creative problem solving.”
The NFIB data reflects recent research from Reimagine Main Street, a public private strategy research project in collaboration with PayPal.
Reimagine surveyed nearly 1,000 small businesses with annual revenues between $25,000 and $50,000, and found that quarters are already beginning to integrate AI into their daily workflows.
Schwegmann said in his company that AI even supports the arena.
“One of the things Harvey has to let us do is review, understand, incorporate and respond to these types of AI tools much faster than before we used them,” he said. “They can put papers on you until they die, so the party has no advantage anymore.”
