How Law Firms Can Use AI to 2X to 10X Their Productivity | Joe Popper

How Law Firms Can Use AI to 2X to 10X Their Productivity

Most law firm owners are aware of AI. Most are not using it in any meaningful way.

IT and AI expert Joe Popper of Popper Tech Team joined Kelley Brubaker on Your Profitable Law Firm for their third conversation to break down exactly how law firms can apply AI to the parts of their business that are draining time and profit.

The core message: the biggest AI opportunities for law firms have nothing to do with writing legal documents.

The Four Levels of AI Adoption

Joe describes AI adoption as a progression across four levels:

Level One: Basic Prompting

This is where most people start. Using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Microsoft Copilot to ask questions, draft content, organize information, and brainstorm. It is conversational and immediate. Talking to AI rather than typing tends to produce faster and more natural results, especially on mobile.

Level Two: AI Agents

Agents go beyond answering questions. They take action. An agent can receive a task, access documents or systems, process information, and deliver a result without the user being present throughout. This is where AI starts doing actual work rather than just responding to prompts.

Level Three: Team-Wide AI

This is deploying AI tools and agents across an organization so the productivity gains are not limited to one person. It requires setting up the right infrastructure, governance, and security so that AI can operate safely at scale.

Level Four: AI as an Employee

At this level, AI is supervised by humans rather than operated by them. The human's job shifts from doing the work to reviewing, approving, and directing the AI's output. Joe describes this as the endgame: humans as supervisors of AI, not replacements for it.

The IKEA Case Study: What AI Abundance Actually Looks Like

Joe shared the IKEA example to illustrate what a successful AI transition looks like in practice.

IKEA had approximately 8,000 customer service employees. They deployed AI to handle customer support calls, chats, and emails. The AI successfully resolved about 60 to 65 percent of all customer inquiries and achieved higher customer satisfaction scores than the human agents had.

Rather than eliminating those 8,000 jobs, IKEA retrained those employees as interior design consultants. These employees already knew the product line inside and out. They became the workforce behind a new $99 design consultation service available through the IKEA website. That service now generates over a billion dollars in revenue annually.

The lesson Joe draws from this: AI did not replace the workforce. It freed the workforce to do higher-value work. Costs went down, revenue went up, and employees moved into roles that were more engaging and better compensated.

Why Most Attorneys Are Focused on the Wrong AI Question

The concern Joe hears most often from attorneys is that AI does not understand the law well enough to be trusted. That concern is legitimate. There are well-documented cases of attorneys submitting AI-generated legal briefs containing fabricated case citations, resulting in court sanctions.

But Joe argues that attorneys are getting stuck on the wrong question. The question is not whether AI can replace legal judgment. It cannot, at least not today.

The question is whether AI can handle the volume of non-legal work that consumes attorney time every day.

The answer to that question is yes.

Back Office AI: The Biggest Opportunity Law Firms Are Missing

Joe draws a clear line between front office AI, which involves legal work like drafting pleadings, and back office AI, which involves business operations. For most law firms, the back office is where the largest and least risky AI opportunities exist.

Examples from the conversation include:

• Time entry formatting: using AI to take loose notes from an attorney and produce standardized, properly formatted time entries that the billing team can actually process

• Document summarization: feeding a contract or lengthy discovery file to AI and asking it to summarize the key points or flag the changes in a redlined version

• Employee reviews and coaching: using AI to pull from performance notes, goals documents, and check-in records to draft structured employee reviews

• New employee onboarding: building an AI coaching agent that a new hire can query to understand processes, escalation paths, and standard procedures without requiring a senior employee to answer every question

• Daily prioritization: using AI to organize a task list and calendar into a logical sequence of action

Why Microsoft Copilot Is the Right AI Tool for Law Firms

Joe recommends Microsoft Copilot specifically for attorneys because of how it handles data security and client confidentiality.

Copilot runs on Microsoft's infrastructure and can be configured with compliance and governance rules. This means law firms can use AI tools while maintaining the ethical obligation to protect client information. Client data stays within a controlled environment rather than being processed through a public AI model.

Equally important, Copilot can be configured to keep each client's information in a separate silo, preventing any cross-contamination between matters. You can ask AI to summarize everything related to a specific client or matter without risk of that information bleeding into another client's context.

What Is Claude CoWork and Why Does It Matter?

One of the more practical tools Joe discussed is Claude CoWork, which is accessible through Microsoft Copilot in a compliant environment.

CoWork allows users to run multiple AI tasks simultaneously in the background. Rather than waiting for one AI task to finish before starting another, you can launch several parallel sessions and let them run while you focus on other work.

The example Joe walked through: ask AI to read every document in a folder and rename each file based on its content. That task might take 20 to 30 minutes or longer depending on volume. While it runs, you start a second CoWork session to draft an employee review using performance notes. While that runs, you start a third session for something else. You return to review and refine the outputs rather than doing the work yourself.

This is what Joe means by AI supervision. The human is directing multiple streams of work simultaneously rather than doing each task sequentially.

The Biggest AI Opportunity for Law Firms: Time and Billing

When Kelley asked Joe what the single biggest AI opportunity is for law firms, his answer was immediate: time and billing.

Timekeeping is one of the most time-consuming and inconsistent administrative tasks in a law firm. Every attorney tends to approach it differently, and the billing team typically has to reconcile widely varying formats and levels of detail before invoices can go out.

AI can solve this by taking an attorney's rough notes or verbal description of their work and outputting a properly formatted, standardized time entry. The attorney describes what they did. AI formats it correctly. The billing team gets consistent entries they can actually process.

This single application has the potential to reduce billing delays, reduce write-offs from poorly documented time, and free up attorney hours that are currently being spent on administrative formatting.

The AI Wire Fraud Warning Every Attorney Needs to Hear

Joe closed the conversation with a cybersecurity reminder that directly involves AI.

AI is now being used by bad actors to craft phishing emails that are nearly indistinguishable from legitimate correspondence. In the past, phishing emails were often easy to spot because of grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, or obvious formatting issues. AI has eliminated most of those tells.

Joe referenced a specific case where a $2 million settlement wire was stolen. The attack worked like this: a hacker intercepted an email chain between two law firms handling a settlement. At the right moment, the hacker impersonated one attorney and sent a message saying the wire instructions had changed. The receiving firm wired $2 million to the fraudulent account.

Joe's two recommendations for every law firm handling wire transfers:

• Put wire instructions in the settlement document itself, not in a separate email. Wire instructions that are embedded in a signed document cannot be modified by an email impersonation attack.

• Before wiring any large sum of money, send a small test amount first and confirm receipt by calling someone you personally know at the receiving firm. Not by replying to an email. A phone call or text to a known contact.

The cost of one wire fee is trivial compared to the cost of a misdirected settlement transfer.

Key Takeaway

AI is not a replacement for attorneys. It is a productivity multiplier for the work that surrounds legal practice.

The firms that will benefit most from AI in the next few years are not the ones waiting for AI to understand the law perfectly. They are the ones using AI right now to eliminate the administrative drag that keeps their attorneys from doing more of the work they are actually paid to do.

As Joe summarized: you are an expert at the law. Let AI make the office run better.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it safe for law firms to use AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot?

It depends on which tool and how it is configured. Public AI tools like the consumer version of ChatGPT are not appropriate for client-privileged information. Microsoft Copilot, run within a properly configured Microsoft environment, can be set up with compliance and governance rules that protect client data and maintain the separation required between matters. Joe recommends Copilot specifically for attorneys for this reason.

What are the four levels of AI adoption for a law firm?

Level one is basic prompting using tools like ChatGPT or Copilot. Level two is using AI agents that can take action and do work independently. Level three is deploying AI across your team or organization. Level four is AI acting as an employee that humans supervise rather than operate. Most law firms are at level one. The largest productivity gains come from moving toward levels two and three.

What is the biggest AI opportunity for law firms right now?

Joe points to time and billing as the highest-impact starting point. AI can take rough attorney notes and produce standardized, properly formatted time entries. This reduces billing delays, inconsistency, and administrative time without requiring any change to how attorneys practice law.

How can law firms protect against AI-powered phishing attacks?

Two practices stand out. First, include wire instructions in your signed settlement documents rather than communicating them by email, so they cannot be intercepted and modified. Second, always send a small test wire before transferring any significant amount and confirm receipt by calling a person you know directly at the receiving firm, not by replying to an email.

Will AI replace attorneys?

Not in any near-term timeframe for the work that requires legal judgment. AI currently performs well at summarizing information, formatting documents, drafting starting points, and automating repetitive tasks. It does not have the reasoning, contextual judgment, or ethical accountability that legal work requires. The more useful frame is how AI can eliminate the non-legal work that takes attorney time away from practicing law.

Connect with Joe Popper

Website: https://poppertechteam.com

Personal site: https://card.onetapconnect.com/joepopper

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joepopper/

Email: joe@poppertechteam.com

Joe offers a free 30-minute consultation at poppertechteam.com. In that time he can assess your current technology setup and identify the highest-value AI opportunities for your firm.

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