AI Predicted the Juror's Exact Number | Trial Lawyer Kevin Mottley

Collin McKee

Welcome back to the Endeavors AI Podcast. I'm your host, Collin McKee, founder of Endeavors AI, where we talk about the intersection of artificial intelligence, law, business, and the new economy being built all around it. My guest today is Kevin Mottley, founder of The Mottley Law Firm, a boutique catastrophic injury practice in Richmond, Virginia — the kind of firm that spends weeks on a single brain injury case, turning it over from every angle. He's also one of the sharpest people I've talked to in a while when it comes to where AI actually earns its place in the trial practice. Not hype — the real world: valuing cases, reading a jury, running a firm. And he's got a story about AI calling a juror's number before she even opened her mouth that I can't wait to get to. But for now, Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Mottley

Thank you.

Collin McKee

So let's start with your path, because you didn't start on this side of the courtroom. You came up in defense — big firms, corporations, and insurers. What made you walk away from that and build your own plaintiff practice?

Kevin Mottley

Sure. I was a partner at an AmLaw 100 law firm. I'd been there my entire career at that time — twelve years, thirty-eight years old. And on my thirty-eighth birthday I left that firm and started my firm the next day. That was my birthday present to myself. That was 17 years ago, and it's been quite an adventure. I like to joke with people that everybody should try it once, starting your own law firm.

At the big law firm, I focused a considerable portion of my practice on defending corporate entities against personal injury suits, and these tended to be rather large. That firm represented a couple of railroads, and so due to rate structures and things like that, I was thrown at a younger age into some significant personal injury cases and got in the courtroom — which was, even back then, starting to get more and more unusual in the world of big law. The other part of my practice was focused on commercial-type litigation: business litigation, real estate litigation, fiduciary-type litigation, things of that nature.

So why did I go into personal injury law? I recall one case in particular, a brain injury case that I was reviewing as a defense lawyer for purposes of an appeal. Another firm had handled the case, and it had not gone well for the defendant — there was a significant verdict awarded to the plaintiff, and our firm was retained to handle the appeal of the verdict. My task as a young associate was to sit in the conference room for a week or two and read the entire trial record. So I read the record, and it was a brain injury case, and it was just very fascinating to me, very interesting. Of course, the case was a significant case. And I do recall at that time a light bulb going off, and I said, you know, if you ever go out on your own, this is the kind of case you should handle. The thought of handling a significant case and making a meaningful difference in a person's life really struck a chord with me.

And I started to develop over the years kind of an itch that I needed to scratch, which was to start something, to create something. Fundamentally, I'm a creator. I have a background in art — if you walk around my office you see a few of my things that I've done. That's something I probably got from my mother. I don't know where she got it from, but one of my daughters has inherited that, and she's really taken that gift and done a lot with it. So I'm fundamentally a creator, and I was never going to be happy until I was creating something.

Collin McKee

Yep. You also mentioned on our first call that you wanted to sit first chair on every case and do it your way. Does that tie into your creative bug? So what did it take to actually get you there, to the point where you were in the driver's seat on a case?

Kevin Mottley

Yes, yes. It took some patience. I do see stories of young lawyers just charging out of the gate, no experience, getting the case of a lifetime, handling it, going to trial, and getting a big verdict. That does happen — I've seen that happen. For me, I'm a little bit more of an observer, to be honest, and I needed that portion of my plaintiff's-lawyer career to just soak things in, learn, and watch others who are very talented in the space do what they do. I got to work on some cases with folks like that and learn from them. And when the time came, the phone started ringing for me to handle significant cases, and I started to get my opportunities to first-chair matters, and that's gone very well.

Collin McKee

Excellent. So now, as far as caseload, I think you mentioned that you're working on about six cases or so.

Kevin Mottley

We usually have fewer than ten of what I call active matters. I think when you and I last spoke it was around six; since we last spoke it's now eight, which is good. But we pride ourselves on being the type of firm that can just dive into a case and own that case. That's where I think you really get high-quality representation for your clients, and that's always been the main goal — to provide the best legal representation for our clients that we can.

There's an inherent tension between the so-called volume practice, the retail practice in the injury space, and that goal of providing excellent work. The most excellent lawyer in the world can't do everything. So I've always set out to have a number of cases where we're not focused on quantity — we're focused on quality, and on doing the best we can with each particular case.

And I look at my cases constantly, like my inventory. I look at each case — I kind of pick it up and turn it over in my brain — and the question I'm asking is: how valuable can we make this case? And what is it going to take to do that? It's what Mark Lanier, who I'm a big fan of — I've been to a number of his events, and he also has a big-law background, which kind of made me gravitate towards him — calls GPSing the case. What's the destination? And I do that on all my cases religiously: what is this case worth, and how do we get there? We have the luxury of doing that in our firm, and the results show — we've had some great traction, some great results in the cases that we've been blessed to have.

I came at the plaintiff's practice a little different. A lot of people come in and they're thrown right into a plaintiff's practice where all it is is volume and PI cases. That's not my background — I came from a corporate law firm, an AmLaw 100 firm, big law. So I still had legacy work from those days that was sent to me and paid by the hour. When I started out, my firm's revenue was about ninety-five percent billable-by-the-hour work, and the occasional personal injury case was five percent. Over the years that's flipped to the point where it's the opposite now. So that gave me a runway and a luxury. When I started my firm I had three kids under the age of 10. I had a mortgage. I had two car payments. And I had a wife who was staying at home with our children. So I had to pay the bills, and that billable-by-the-hour work — which, again, I was blessed to have — really gave me the ability to ramp into the PI space over time.

Collin McKee

Cool. So having a smaller caseload gives you more time to really think about the case holistically and do the very best with it — or for it. And I think that's a good segue for when you brought AI and large language models into the thinking of it. Can you kind of step back? I think you told me a story of a closed-door seminar you had gone to with a handful of lawyers back in 2023, and what happened in that room that kind of flipped a switch for you.

Kevin Mottley

Sure. The company that I have used for years for my web marketing and website SEO, that sort of thing — they did a small-group seminar for some of their clients on artificial intelligence. And I have to say, even back then — I think that was 2023, so not that long ago — I felt like even then I was late to the party. It seemed like several other lawyers knew so much more about it than I did. Now, was I familiar with it? Sure, I was — I'd heard about it and was kind of like, okay, yeah, yeah, I'll get to that. That was the first time, though, that I actually sat down and looked at what it could do. I learned about some of the different AI providers or services — software packages; I don't even know what you call them — ChatGPT, Perplexity, et cetera, and I started to learn about its capabilities.

Did the light bulb go off at that moment so that I charged out and started making drastic changes? No. I actually started playing around with it more in my personal life at that point. I do recall that that year we were planning to take my youngest daughter to Washington, DC — our nation's capital — over the holiday, the Christmas–New Year's holiday. And I told my wife, I said, I'm going to use ChatGPT to create an itinerary for us. And she said, no, don't do that, that's crazy — we don't want them to have our personal information. So I said okay, but then I quietly did it. Well, about halfway through the trip, my wife looked at me and said, wow — how did you think of all of this? How did you find that restaurant? I mean, we've got such a crisp itinerary here. This is very unlike you.

And I had to confess at that point that I had used ChatGPT to build the trip. And that was honestly my first experience really seeing what it could do. So over time I've gradually started to dip my toe into using it in the legal practice. But I tell you what — in the last six months, my eyes have really been opened as to what it can do in the law practice. It's like breathing really fresh air and having tons of energy, because it's like, wow — just incredible.

Collin McKee

So where did it land first in your practice? Was it reviewing cases, or case intake — where did you utilize it?

Kevin Mottley

I think for us — as I said earlier, I'm kind of an observer for a while, and that's just my personality. And that's kind of how the firm's experience with AI started. And I think that's a smart thing. For anybody watching this who's thinking about starting to have AI come into your operation, whether it's a law firm or something else: take it easy, test things out, and get familiar with it before just diving in the deep end. That's just my advice.

A good example of the initial ways we would use it would be to take a first pass at a legal research question, or to take a first pass at a potential client's matter that comes to us — let's say a product liability case. Just do a first pass at some simple questions and see what comes back. And then, of course, verify all of that yourself, as you would have done in the past with your legal research tools, et cetera — which, incidentally, are using AI as well. So that's kind of how it started with us — probably in the area of legal research.

The other area: as the owner of the firm and the CEO of the firm, at least fifty percent of my time I'm thinking about working on the business, not necessarily in the operations of the business. And so that's the other area where it immediately and prominently started to take a foothold for me — helping me do everything from budget to coming up with scenarios for the future of my firm, running various scenarios out, financial scenarios, et cetera. So those two areas are probably where we started using it the most. But that changed when we had a really large case in recent years that we were starting to focus group.

Collin McKee

Cool. Yeah, I think that's great advice — just get some reps in, use it, play around with it, see how it works, like you did in your personal life. Sometimes when people realize the true value of it is when they see: I can make this apply in my personal life; maybe I can take the same general concepts and apply them to some repetitive stuff that I do in my business world — with guardrails on, of course.

So here's the story that I did want to get to. You run real focus groups — real people in real rooms — and then you started virtualizing that, taking the cases and triangulating that with AI. If you would, share the story of the tractor-trailer case and what that was.

Kevin Mottley

Sure. Yeah, that was what I just alluded to, actually — probably one of the first examples of us expanding its use a little bit. One of the typical types of cases we'll handle here involves commercial motor carriers — tractor-trailer cases, for lack of a better word — and we had a significant one in the last couple of years.

On all of our cases we have a habit of focus grouping them. And what we've traditionally done with that is we've actually assembled live folks — we usually have three juries of seven people, so 21 to 25 people — and we create this big presentation, and it's read to these folks. We hire a company to do this for us; it's not us in-house doing it, but we do create the presentation. And then we kind of split up: I'll watch one jury deliberate while my colleague Ben Kyber here will watch another, and perhaps my paralegal will watch the third, as well as the folks who represent the jury focus group company. So we've got lots of eyeballs on these three different juries.

The other type of focus group we have done in the past is what I refer to as more of a big-data-type model, where you have a survey presentation that's given to people virtually, and they kind of vote on the case and what they would do. So in a big case we'll traditionally do both — we'll have live focus groups, maybe multiple ones, to test out different things, but we'll also do a big-data study where we'll test out various things as well. And I'm a big believer in — I call it triangulating on the value of a case — I'm a big believer in getting as many perspectives as you can.

And so it occurred to me in the middle of one of these big cases that we had more recently, in the last couple of years: we'd done all this work on the focus group presentation, the focus group was about to begin, and I told my team, hey, I've got an idea. Let's sanitize this presentation — get the names out and everything — and let's submit this to, I think it was ChatGPT. We have, I guess, a professional subscription of that. So we got the thing all cleaned up to remove any confidential information, submitted it to ChatGPT, and set it up so that we made ChatGPT look at this from the perspective of a juror — or a jury — in this particular region of Virginia, and we asked it what it would do with this case if it were the jury. We got back a bunch of information, and then the focus group started. While they were reading the submission to the focus group, though, I was reading what ChatGPT was saying about it.

And it said something that was interesting. It said: your most conservative jurors will want to award between eight and nine million dollars on this case. And I thought, well, that's terrific, because that's a nice number for a quote-unquote conservative juror. I don't believe it, but okay, that's fine. So we did the focus group, and then it came time for the people to start talking about the case. And there was one lady on the focus group jury that I was watching who was clearly the most conservative juror. She was in a rural area, she homeschools her children, she's a tough lady — a very independent, self-sufficient woman with a strong personality; you could just tell. And the first thing out of her mouth, when they went around the table and said, okay, what does everybody think about this case — she said: I was leaning towards eight to nine million dollars. The exact number that ChatGPT told me my most conservative jurors would be wanting to award. At that point I was like, my gosh, this is crazy. It just blew my mind.

And so we've done that over and over again now with other focus groups. And I would say, again — it's just one more piece of data. One thing you do have to watch out for with any of these artificial intelligence providers is their algorithms, I guess, spitting out something that you want to hear instead of something that's data-driven and grounded in reality. My perception is I see more of that on ChatGPT than some others, but I think even there you can probably dissuade it from doing that. But like everything, you have to be cautious, and it's just another data point. I would not make a decision, frankly, on the value of a case based off of it. But it always gives you some new information, some new insights, some new ideas. And it is just another data point — which, in that case, was remarkably accurate.

Collin McKee

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what do you think about that, when it gets the number almost exactly spot on?

Kevin Mottley

I just don't know how it did that. I don't. But I tell you what I'm doing now: I'm going back in time and pulling forward all of my results over the last 17 years. And I have that data — the earlier years are a little messier and hard to track down, but I'm tracking down some granular data and putting it in a massive database, and we'll be submitting that to AI and building more of a scientific way of valuing cases based off of my data. And that includes a lot of granular details about cases that kind of pull the levers on valuation. And I'm really excited about that. So if you want to know what I'm working on this week — that's what I'm working on this week.

Collin McKee

That's excellent. I think that's a unique use case, and it's a very viable one. For those that are a little skittish about using AI in active cases, this is a great way, because it's safe — the case is already done and closed, and you could take former information, throw that into the large language model, and see how it would come out against today's comparative cases. That's a smart move. I like it.

Kevin Mottley

Yeah. I mean, if you run a law firm like me — a plaintiff's firm — you probably do some version of what I've done, which is: you look at your inventory of cases, you come up with, you know, what's a worst-case scenario, a best-case scenario, and what you think these cases will likely settle for in between. And if you're doing budgeting, which you should be doing, you try to make business decisions based off of those. And I thought I was really good at that. I told somebody in my firm, hey, I'm really good at that. And then I thought to myself, I'm not so sure I am — let's test it out. So I put myself to the test, and I found out I'm not that great at predicting things. My actual results were within the band that I come up with, but I found out that I've got a bias there, and that affects that band. I'm always between the goalposts — not always, but on average I'm making my field goals — but the ball is a little too close to one of the uprights than I'd prefer on my predictions. And this is going to help me get better at that.

Collin McKee

Yeah, 100%. So looking to the future of AI — because we kind of touched on this before — there are more and more rules; you have to disclose whether you used AI in pretty much any part of a case. Where do you see, in your experience, the rules heading for trial lawyers when it comes to AI in the next year or two?

Kevin Mottley

Well, I think you're going to see certain law schools prohibiting the use of AI. I think you're going to see that. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a colleague — a classmate of mine who's a professor at a top-ten law school — and we had that conversation recently, and he mentioned that as being an up-and-coming thing. So I think you're going to start to see that, and I can appreciate that in the academic setting — we can get into why I appreciate that in a moment. That's going to be a change, I think, for youngsters who are going through school. But maybe it won't — maybe by the time they get there, they'll already have undergraduate experiences where they're dissuaded from using AI, or prohibited. I don't know.

As far as the way it sits right now in the legal profession and how we practice: obviously we've all read the stories about those lawyers — I think it was in New York — who submitted a brief to a federal court that was replete with phantom case citations. Or is that the right word, phantom? Or ghost? Not even real case law, that sort of thing. Obviously that's a known problem, and the rules already provide a remedy for that sort of legal malpractice, frankly — which is just submitting something without checking to make sure it's well grounded in law.

But we've seen locally that the judges — for example, here in my local state court, the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond — have within the last six months entered an order, a standing order, that requires you to certify when you have used AI. And it's a very broad order. It'll be interesting to see how that is actually implemented in practice. I appreciate that effort, but I think when you see an order like that — the idea behind it that I'm discerning — I don't know why the judges in our local court wrote the order that they wrote in the way that they wrote it; it's very broad. But I imagine, if you could go behind closed doors and listen in to what their concerns are, the concerns are stories like the New York lawyers who had these fake cases that were cited. Another concern is pro se litigants, who are probably the worst offenders when it comes to the use of AI in legal submissions. And there's also this tinge of: this is perhaps unethical, and therefore it's dangerous and bordering on unethical, and therefore if you're doing it, you should disclose it.

I do have some misgivings about that part of it, if that's part of the analysis. I mean, this is just a tool. The rules already say what you as an attorney are saying when you sign a pleading. You're saying that this is real case law, this is a real citation, this fact that I'm telling you about is not something that AI made up — it's something that I've verified. We're already doing that through the existing rules. But I think that's the perceived danger that is behind a lot of these orders that you see.

The way I look at it, though, is: using AI, using any of these tools, is part of an attorney's work product. And if we're going to be required to disclose when we use a certain tool as part of our work product in the creation of things we submit to court, I think judges should be required to do the same thing. I mean, if a judge is using AI, I think they need to certify that in their opinion. So I don't think that's necessary — but if it's required for lawyers, if there's something dirty about this, it should be required for judges too. And I think you may see some movement in that regard. I don't know.

Collin McKee

And then another piece of that is your clients. Of course, clients are using it all over the place. Let's look at both sides: you told me about one client that used it and they found your firm, so that's definitely a positive. And then you've got the client who's throwing everything into ChatGPT, viewing that as an attorney, or even a higher reference point than your services — and that makes things a little bit more difficult. So it's a two-edged sword. But what's your thought on the process of your clients using it as a first step before entering the courtroom or entering your law firm? Is that a good thing, bad thing?

Kevin Mottley

Right. Yeah, it's really interesting, because — and I know that I'm not alone in seeing this — clients and prospective clients are neck deep into AI, and they're using it to find you and to then manage the relationship with you and the communications they're having with you.

I'll take one extreme: the potential client who comes to you, and you see their first intake message to your firm, and you start reading it. It's very long, it's very detailed, it's very well organized, and it looks just like AI drafted it. That, to me, is a red flag — it's kind of a red flag that's halfway up. I mean, I appreciate it — let's take a medical malpractice case. These are very complex, lots of medical jargon, and the clients can be very sophisticated too. It's not unusual to me that they would feed a scenario through AI and get help selling their case to a potential lawyer, because ninety-five percent of med-mal potential clients get rejected by most lawyers, and so they're trying to step their game up and articulate their situation better to lawyers. And so I understand that. But that first touch point, and how much they've used AI, is a little bit of a red flag, because it tells you that they are potentially going to manage the relationship with you like that — which, to me, can become a real problem.

You take a person who's on the far extreme there: they submit that sort of thing to your firm — that's their first touch — and then you send them a legal representation agreement, and they send that back to you marked up by AI, with all sorts of suggestions for how you should change your fee agreement. That's when I usually exit the stage left and say, no thank you — I'm just not going to go there. But even during the relationship, perhaps you start seeing that AI is helping them second-guess everything you're doing. And that just becomes an unworkable situation. They're not trusting you to handle their case — they're trusting AI to handle the case. Thankfully, I haven't gotten in that sort of situation yet. But that's what I'm on guard with. That's kind of one extreme.

At the other extreme, you have someone who is AI-light, and they're not doing that. Most people are kind of somewhere in the middle. Of course, when you're telling them things, they're bouncing it off AI. You have a discussion with them about the value of their case — of course that is going to happen, and I think it's unrealistic to think that it won't. But in that extreme case, it can really cause problems with the attorney-client relationship.

Moving on to how they find you: I would say that in the last eight to twelve months for us, a growing percentage of the leads that we see here in our firm found us through AI. And so it's so important to have rich content that is organized in a way that increases your chances that AI would recommend your content as the source for a question that it is asked. We have a way of tracking that here, but we also ask people how they found us. And we have seen a growing tendency of them to trust AI.

It's just like — right now I'm going through a big renovation project on a house that my wife and I just purchased, and I'm a gardener; that's one of my hobbies. And so I'm starting to wonder, okay, what should I be growing? I want to plant this herb garden, and I don't have much experience with herbs. So what's the first place I stop to find out what the best herbs are to grow around here, and how do you do it? Of course, it's AI. If I type into Google, hey, what are the best herbs in Virginia — probably the first thing that comes up is a sponsored ad from a local nursery, which I skip over or ignore. And instead I use the long-form answer there at the top in Google — that is Gemini. So that's, I think, how people are approaching lawyers as well.

Collin McKee

Yep, I would agree. I mean, that's a topic for a whole additional episode — AI visibility. That's something that, to your point, maybe six months ago no one even talked about, but now, to your point, it behooves everyone to start working on that. I was going to ask for one thing that any law firm could start working on today, and I think that would be a good recommendation right there — just to see how visible your firm is in AI today. And if you want to give any other takeaway to a firm that's dipping their toe in these new technologies, what's something that a firm should start, say, this week?

Kevin Mottley

Well, look, it's like anything else. Early in my career as a solo lawyer out on my own, a piece of advice somebody gave me about various services was to do your homework, compare services, learn about how different services operate, what their strengths and weaknesses are. There are plenty of ways to research that. So that's point number one.

Point number two is: okay, if we get into this service — let's say you sign up for an AI service for your type of law — how do we get out of this? What's the exit strategy? I don't know that that's as important with these sorts of vendors who are out there, but that is a question: okay, if we try this particular service out, how do we get out of it if it doesn't work?

So I would look at your options. I'm going to the American Association for Justice — the AAJ — conference in Chicago next week, and I know that there will be a dozen AI vendors there trying to get me to sign up for their service. You can spend a lot of money on this stuff, and I would just encourage you to be a little bit of an observer, do your research, and just think critically about what these various options that are given to you can do, what their strengths and weaknesses are. And then start small. Just don't start throwing money at something. So that's kind of my advice to someone who may be looking.

Collin McKee

Cool, very sound advice. Well, Kevin Mottley, how can our audience find out more about your firm and what you guys have going on?

Kevin Mottley

Well, we've got a wonderful website, so you can always find us there — that's Mottley Law Firm dot com, with two Ts. And if you're in the Richmond, Virginia area, stop in and say hello. And if you have a matter that requires the services of a Virginia attorney in a significant injury case, we would love and be honored to be considered for helping you out with that.

Collin McKee

Excellent. Yeah, we'll leave all that information in the show notes. And if anyone in the audience is trying to figure out their AI visibility or trying to dip their toe in AI workflows and automation, that's what Endeavors AI does. We would like to guide people in a disciplined way into our new AI age. It's not something that we can avoid anymore — it's something we have to grab the reins on, but do it in a responsible manner. With that, Kevin Mottley, thank you for your time. This is the Endeavors AI Podcast, and we will see you in the next episode.

Kevin Mottley

Thank you.