CASE STUDY
GenAI levels the legal playing field for abuse survivors
Guy D’Andrea works hard to help survivors of abuse get the legal support they need. That journey started 17 years ago at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office. Eight years later, he moved to Laffey Bucci D’Andrea Reich & Ryan, where he now exclusively represents survivors of sexual violence, bullying, hazing, physical abuse, and neglect.
Today, he’s using the game-changing power of generative AI (GenAI) solutions from Thomson Reuters to support his team’s efforts and get his clients the justice they deserve.
GenAI is an equalizer
D’Andrea was an early adopter of GenAI. His fascination began at a conference where they were demoing ChatGPT, and he could see its potential to mitigate time-intensive manual processes like legal research, summaries, and timelines.
About five days before a deposition, Guy received a massive data dump from the defense team.
“It was literally millions of pages digitally. It was the proverbial U-Haul truck of pulling up and dropping off the bankers’ boxes to bury a plaintiff’s attorney in work.”
With a deadline looming and knowing he cannot postpone the deposition or go in ill-prepared, D’Andrea thought, “Is there another solution? Is there a way? AI seems amazing,” says D’Andrea. He knew he could not put all the confidential documents into a consumer-grade product. He needed something compliant and secure for his needs. Thankfully, he learned of CoCounsel and uploaded the documents for summarization at breakneck speed. “It blew my mind,” he recalls.
D’Andrea uses CoCounsel to make easy work of timelines and hot doc identification, which now puts his firm at parity with the larger defense teams he is competing against. “In the plaintiff's world, GenAI is equalizing,” says D’Andrea.
Using GenAI responsibly to benefit clients
Always forward-thinking, D’Andrea recognizes the value of putting GenAI to use for his clients. “If you don’t get behind this, I think you're doing an incredible disservice to your clients,” he says.
But D’Andrea also encourages caution. “The ethical considerations as it relates to AI are serious,” he says. He stresses the need to be careful when using different platforms and the importance of setting rules and procedures that are easy to follow and do not jeopardize confidential data. “You have to trust the product you are using. Trust, but verify,” D’Andrea says.
That is why he chose to go with Thomson Reuters’ suite of AI solutions. “Choosing Thomson Reuters was a no-brainer for me,” says D’Andrea. After vetting other options, he realized there was nothing better on the market than CoCounsel. “You have the power and the name and reputation of Thomson Reuters and Westlaw, which in the legal industry is a household name.” The combination of CoCounsel and Westlaw was a true testament, in Guy’s mind, to Thomson Reuters wanting to always be on the pioneering edge.
CoCounsel and Westlaw Precision — working in tandem
D’Andrea has experienced the power of CoCounsel in generating summaries, timelines, and hot doc identification. He also sees the benefits of GenAI come to life in Westlaw Precision, as he uses AI-Assisted Research to lay the groundwork for his cases. "Westlaw Precision is a game-changer as it relates to legal research," he says. Within minutes, he can get an answer to an issue. While AI-Assisted Research saves him 80% of his legal research time, D’Andrea knows that is not the end of his research. Because each answer from AI-Assisted Research provides links to the cases, statutes, and regulations on Westlaw Precision used to generate the answer, he can easily verify the information.
He periodically gives his law clerks and AI-Assisted Research the same prompt to assess its accuracy. In his experience, AI-Assisted Research delivers the same case information in minutes versus days. “It's been that good for us,” he admits.
After getting his questions answered from AI-Assisted Research, D’Andrea once again uses CoCounsel to review documents and look for things that can help or hurt his case based on the research he has just done. “Now you have the law that you need, you’re having the documents reviewed looking for exactly what you need to make out or win, or whatever the issue is — all while you’re sipping your first cup of coffee, not five days later.”
Tangible benefits to his practice and client well-being
CoCounsel’s GenAI capabilities and Westlaw Precision allow D’Andrea and his team to work more practically, more efficiently, and with the same high quality. They can also do more with the same resources. “This has allowed us to take on even more cases without increasing our overhead,” he adds.
The time saved is huge. D’Andrea is routinely given thousands of pages and documents to sort through. Using CoCounsel, “I'll have a summary that's near perfect and a timeline that outlines every significant event contextually in less than seven minutes,” he says. “It saves us weeks!” As a firm that works on contingency, time savings is critical, as it can help minimize the need for extensions, which is good for the firm and its clients.
On a personal level, D’Andrea says CoCounsel helps him be sharp on every case. You cannot know every case inside and out if you have a docket of more than 100 cases. With CoCounsel, D’Andrea is able to be on the phone with a client and give them an answer in 30 seconds. It also provides him with time to hone his courtroom skills. “It allows you to hyper-focus on that incredibly important skill set — and less on the everyday monotony of what we sometimes do in the practice of law.”
D’Andrea also recognizes that certain features, like timelines and summaries, can put his clients at greater ease. “One of the really impactful things that helps with clients is there’s always that dread when you are in dep prep. The client is inevitably going to say something to the effective of ‘what are they going to ask me?’” Unfortunately, he does not know, but he can make an educated guess based on his past experiences with this or other defense teams. However, the reality is that nobody ever knows until they walk into the room.
“The client is worried that the defense is going to get them jumbled all over the place, or they will ask them about dates, and they will say ‘I do not remember this, that or the other. I cannot tell you at this hour on this date.’” The timeline feature minimizes the anxiety for his clients. “You can see the relaxation coming off of them,” says D’Andrea.
With an actual timeline of the events, you can sit down with your client and say, “This is the timeline that they are operating under,” continues D’Andrea. He then produces a complete, dated timeline from which they can work. He can ask them what they recall, whether something is true or not, and they can figure it out together. If a client wants the highlights of a particular defendant’s testimony, it’s a quick process. He can load the transcript to CoCounsel, ask the client how detailed they want it, and within minutes, he gets them what they want. “It helps tremendously, and it goes a long way with that client relations and making them really feel in control and part of that case, which is hyper-important for survivors.”
A professional obligation to serve clients better
The power of GenAI to serve clients is a no-brainer, in D’Andrea’s opinion. "If you want to be that person who's behind all the time, then don't use this,” he says jokingly. “But if you want to honor your rules of professional responsibility, if you want to do what’s right by your client, and if you want to move cases along faster, better, and more efficiently, then you’ve got to use this."
