By: Anamaria Pananas
The legal industry has been slow to adapt to the digital age. Many legal professionals are skeptical about straying away from tradition. However, legal AI startups are currently making big waves, signaling a culture change in the industry. A study done this year reported that over 70% of legal professionals trust AI and would use it for their legal work. For instance, consider an AI tool that could flag more than $200 million in missing documents, increasing settlements up to 30%. EvenUp’s AI model, Piai, does just that for over 1,000 personal injury law firms. This shows how legal AI has the potential to increase efficiency in law firms and guarantee better results for their clients.
EvenUp Co-Founder and COO, Raymond Mieszaniec, and his family spent years in court after Ray’s father was in a car accident that left him permanently disabled. His family decided to settle, only to discover later that the case was worth much more. Ray knew that better access to accurate data could have changed his family’s outcome, so he set out to provide access for other families by creating EvenUp.
EvenUp’s products have now helped firms claim over $1.5 billion in damages. The products include features designed to save time, enhance consistency and affordability, reduce under-compensation, and overall accelerate the resolution of cases. However, speed in no way replaces accuracy. EvenUp is dedicated to ensuring that the data and information formulated by AI are accurate and thorough. Below is a brief explanation of how a couple of these products work:
Demand Packages: Personal injury firms create packages containing information about the client’s accident and send them to insurance companies. AI can now generate these legal documents that provide all the data an insurance company will need to assess the claim. Medical summaries in the demand package flag missing bills, specify dates of treatment, and include details of each visit. Price estimates for each element of loss use over 250,000 data points from verdicts, settlements, and economic models.
Medical Chronologies (“MedChrons”): Personal injury lawyers use MedChrons to understand their clients’ medical histories. Often time-consuming, EvenUp reduces the time spent on organizing this information by over fifteen hours. A highlighted feature is the ability to create a web-based MedChron, which allows lawyers to seamlessly choose between specific issues of the case, embedded with hyperlinks to exhibits.
With no shortage of investments, EvenUp has expanded its product list. The four new products include Case Preparation, Negotiation Preparation, Executive Analytics, and Settlement Repository.
Case and Negotiation Preparation: Improving case preparation relies on the ability to identify problems like missing medical bills and records early in the case process. Case Companion, a legal AI assistant, is built into these products. Case Companion allows lawyers to have conversations with the raw document and data to reveal any discrepancies or other avenues of evidence to pursue.
Executive Analytics and Settlement Repository: These tools are essential to maintain transparency in the personal injury field. They provide datasets that allow firms to set benchmarks versus other firms and compare settlement amounts among all the cases within their own firm.
EvenUp has adapted its legal AI to provide solutions for personal injury firms across the country. As a result, EvenUp is now worth a billion dollars. This places legal AI in an exciting new light for investors and signals towards a promising future for legal technology startups.
Law firms have accelerated the pace of adopting new technology due to the demands of the pandemic. Modernization became a necessity to stay afloat. Now, it is not only necessary, but preferred. EvenUp’s success teaches three important lessons to consider for any legal AI startup looking to gain ground or for any firm hesitant to embrace AI tools: 1) Time 2) Thoroughness 3) Transparency.
Legal AI startups like EvenUp are reshaping traditional concepts of how much time a single task can take, allowing firms to take on more cases. McCready Law Injury Attorneys, one of EvenUp’s customers, reported to have saved over 300 hours by using AI to quickly answer questions about cases. Saving time on the basic and tedious aspects of the work allows more time to focus on strategy.
AI can also catch things that a human cannot, even with thorough review. Often, overlooking a data point can cost both the client and the firm considerable time and money. This is why firms should consider using AI tools equipped to review long documents that may contain data easily overlooked by the human eye. In the personal injury field, it is particularly important to identify any missing bills or records. The McCready firm reported that they had a $600,000 impact on potential settlements due to AI identifying such data for them.
EvenUp’s founders believe that the future of personal injury rests on the field’s ability to be transparent. If firms had a better estimate of how much a case is worth, they could provide fairer compensation for plaintiffs. In fact, 99% of injury claims are settled, which deepens the lack of transparency and reflects the magnitude of this issue. This is why the Settlement Repository is a game-changer; it allows firms to receive an estimate of the case by comparing it with similar cases the firm has taken.
Looking ahead, legal AI tools will continue to encourage positive change within the industry by reducing busy work and increasing accuracy. EvenUp’s founders saw a solution to a problem where people were getting under-compensated due to a lack of transparent information. The company has opened the door to legal technology’s potential success—and they are just getting started.
Student Bio: Anamaria Pananas is a second-year law student at Suffolk University Law School. She is a staff member for the Journal of High Technology Law. Anamaria received a Bachelor of Science degree in Media Science with a minor in Statistics from Boston University in 2023.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.
