The Lawyer Who Builds His Own AI Tools

Collin McKee

Most lawyers fall into one of two camps when it comes to AI: quietly terrified of it, or pretending to use it. Today's guest is neither. Patrick Williams was a computer engineer before he was an attorney. He got out of tech right as the 2001 collapse hit, went to law school, and now runs a family law firm where he doesn't just use AI — he builds his own tools and hands them to the entire team. He's also the first person to tell you exactly where it burned him. Patrick, welcome. For anyone who doesn't know you yet, give us the thirty-second version of who you are and what keeps you busy these days.

Patrick Williams

Thanks for having me — glad to be here. I'm Patrick, a family law attorney and one of the founding partners of Batch, Poore & Williams in Raleigh, North Carolina. We do family law, and we have some other practice areas as well, but family law is the gist of it. I started this firm directly out of law school back in 2005, and since then we're up to ten total employees, six attorneys. We built it over time. I call myself the trial-and-error king, and I'm a gadget guy — any tool I can find from a technological standpoint that makes my job easier and automates things in my practice, I'm employing it.

Collin McKee

You're one of the only attorneys I've talked to who started out building computers instead of arguing cases. Take me back to computer engineering at NC State. How does that path even begin? You were a sysadmin doing network security work in the dot-com bubble burst — what did that look like with the layoffs?

Patrick Williams

It was an interesting story. Going into school I thought I wanted to do microprocessor design, so my major was computer engineering. Then I did a co-op — I think my sophomore year — where I got introduced to Unix and Unix system administration, Linux, the non-Windows operating systems. I interned at IBM in Austin, Texas, and starting that job and learning what I learned there taught me the skills I needed to be a system administrator, and it was in demand at the time. So my junior year in college I was a sysadmin, and I decided to do that full time and go to college part-time. I was making good money at the time, so I thought, "Hey, I don't need to finish college — why would I do that?" I did system administration for a bunch of internet service providers in the area. Then ultimately in 2001 things went south — two companies I was working for went under, and I got laid off from another. The last job I had was doing web admin and Unix admin, and I just thought, "This market is not for me. I need to shift to a field where I have a little more control over what happens if the market goes down — something more recession-proof, where I can go out on my own if I need to." That's where the idea of law came from. And it turned out some of the same logic you use in programming and administration is very similar to the logic you use when you're making arguments based on the law. It was a good fit.

Collin McKee

That answers my next question — why law. A lot of the same structure of how you think about things applies. So let's talk about your firm and where it sits today. How's it structured? Who does what?

Patrick Williams

We have four partners now and two associates, but basically everyone does family law — that's the bread and butter. I've got two partners additionally focused on child welfare law; they deal with Department of Social Services investigations. I have a pretty strong focus on alienation of affection cases, which are very rare — I believe there are only three states in the country where that's a legal cause of action. It's basically a cause of action that gives a spouse the ability to sue the paramour if there's an affair. I've argued alienation of affection cases up to the Supreme Court here in North Carolina, so I've gotten a bit of a reputation for those. Then we have another partner who does estate planning and another who does general civil litigation, and we all have associates working on cases with us, plus a paralegal. One of the mantras of our firm is a team-based approach: everyone has a partner, an associate, and a paralegal on their case, so we can be extremely responsive to clients when they have questions.

Collin McKee

On top of practicing — and obviously being the tech lead with your background — you're also the marketing lead. How did that hat wind up on your head?

Patrick Williams

I'm the marketing and technology guru, naturally because of my background and doing tech support around the office. But it started when I founded my firm and I didn't have a lot of money. The one thing I knew I could build for no money was an internet marketing presence. I understood how to make a website, so I designed my website initially and worked on search engine optimization very early on. Paid ads weren't huge back then — this is 2006, when people were still walking around trying to sell physical yellow pages. But as paid ads became a big thing, we started doing paid advertising and I started that campaign. It's been natural for me to continue to lead in those areas. I've offloaded some of it to third-party vendors from time to time — some of those experiences have been disastrous, some good; the vendor I work with now is really good. But any type of technology that helps automate things in the office or helps us do admin tasks, I'm the person who says, "Hey, I found this cool tool, let's use it."

Collin McKee

Ladies and gentlemen, he doesn't have my questions in front of him and somehow knows what I'm about to ask. There's one question a lot of people ask but might not say out loud: how do I get more done with fewer people, or without having to hire more? I'm not saying AI is coming for your job — I really don't think it is — but people would like to get more out of their day without increasing their HR spend. Is AI solving that for your firm? Are you getting more done with the same number of people?

Patrick Williams

Absolutely. It is a time-saver on repetitive tasks, completely — but it comes with the caveat that you can't trust everything it spits out. By way of example: I started out messing around with ChatGPT, and from a law perspective I found it helpful but not extremely accurate. Not enough to trust it. It would get the meat of it done, but you had to look at things with a much finer-tooth comb. When I started using Claude, that's when things started to pick up for us. Claude has been helpful with several tasks we had a hard time with. It's been very helpful for me personally with search engine optimization — something I always outsourced, but now I can run continuous checks on it. We use it to automate billing, which is one of the most tedious tasks. We had a block on everyone's calendar in our firm on Fridays from twelve to four — "make sure your billing is caught up." I was able to create a skill in Claude that creates that initial template for you. At the end of the week it says, "This is all the work we believe is billable," estimates the time, and makes it easy to go through, double-check it, make sure the time is accurate and that you actually did what it says, and enter it. That saved tons of time across the firm. We also use AI in our procedures — an app called Tetra, where we enter our procedures and it uses them as a knowledge base you can ask questions of. We use Slack, so you can ask a question in Slack and it'll search the procedures and say, "This is a probable answer." If there isn't an answer, it'll identify who is most likely to know and send it to that person; when they answer, it automatically adds it to your procedures going forward. It's a growing knowledge base. There's a ton of tools we use, but they've been extremely helpful in taking a lot off our plate, primarily admin things.

Collin McKee

Walk back for a moment — you said twelve to four. That's four hours, but you said "we." How many people were in that weekly billing block?

Patrick Williams

Everyone. It's not a meeting — it's basically, during this time don't schedule anything, because we need to make sure everyone's billing is done. Our attorneys bill and each of our paralegals bill; we have a performance-based bonus system for our paralegals, and it's important for them to put their time in. We've got a couple of employees who get paid based on what they bill. It's saved everyone tons of time, because we're not having to use that entire four-hour block every Friday.

Collin McKee

So whatever that math is — your whole firm times four hours, plus whatever it found. Putting a number on that is nearly impossible, but at minimum it's four times everybody's billable hours.

Patrick Williams

Yeah — and not even just what it saved. You free that time up for more billable hours, or more consultations to take in new clients. Like you said, it's immeasurable.

Collin McKee

On top of that, you don't just take a tool off the shelf. You custom-build things inside Claude and share them across the team. What were you able to design for your firm to buy back even more time?

Patrick Williams

Billing is probably the number-one tool I use. In addition to that, I was having a meeting with one of my intake coordinators and said, "It'd be really nice if I had stats that told me how many consultations are coming in, what the conversion rate is, how many consultations are canceling, and any cross-sections between when they call and when the consultations are scheduled." She said she'd work on it. Then I thought, let me just put this in Claude. We use Slack to communicate within the office, and we have a Slack channel where all the communications about consultations live — what time they scheduled, when they're coming, whether they canceled. So I gave Claude access to that channel, and it runs a report for me every week: this is how many consultations you had, this is how many hired. That's super valuable data from a marketing standpoint, because you know where your clients are coming from, what sources, and how much money is directly correlated to that. I've also used it as a legal assistant to help plan my day: these are your open tasks, your running tasks, this is what you should do in the morning, this is what to focus on in the afternoon. I've spread that to the team. And email — helping me manage email has been a godsend. I'm a heavy task-and-procedure person, so having a task list of what I need to complete and when is extremely helpful, and it makes sure things don't fall through the cracks on deadlines.

Collin McKee

You also built the company website with AI tools?

Patrick Williams

I built it originally before there was AI. But as far as generating new content, it's been helpful with that, and with design elements. I also have a course we'll talk about later, for new small firms and young attorneys who want to start their own firms — the site for that was built with AI, design-wise. I wrote most of it, but the actual design was AI, and some of the tools available in the course that I didn't even know you could put in a webpage were extremely helpful and were built with AI.

Collin McKee

While you're on it — tell us about your course.

Patrick Williams

I launched the course back in April. It's called Firm Builder Blueprint; the website is firmblueprint.law. The purpose is twelve modules of lessons I learned building my firm. It lets people who take the course eliminate my failures and the thousands I spent on vendors who couldn't tell me what they were actually doing for me. It covers incorporating AI into your practice as a small-firm practitioner, to help you compete with larger firms from a workload perspective. It covers getting over the fears and frustrations of starting your firm, how you're going to get your first client, what you should be doing in your initial consultation to close more leads, selecting a practice area, and how to pick how much to charge per hour. But the thing I'm most proud of is the tools section — about seven or eight tools. One calculates the cost of client acquisition. One tracks whether your marketing services are working. One helps you build a firm business plan on what you should focus on to build your clientele. Another is a calculator that computes what your hourly rate should be: you put in how much you want to make and how much you have to spend on marketing, and it tells you what to charge per hour. These are interactive tools — the course is a one-time fee and you can go back and use them as much as you want.

Collin McKee

How long has it been live?

Patrick Williams

Since mid-April — I think April 15th was the launch date. It's unlike anything else out there. When I started my firm there was a book I read that was awesome, but it didn't give you tools and didn't go as in-depth, because some of the advertising methods we have now weren't available then. I think it's the most up-to-date course for helping people start firms.

Collin McKee

We'll put a link in the show notes. That seems like a no-brainer if you're starting out. So — a little of the good, bad, and the ugly. You said before we recorded that AI output is not the end of the story. Unpack that, and give me the real explanation, not the hypothetical.

Patrick Williams

There were two things I used AI for — or at least experimented with at first, primarily ChatGPT — to figure out what it could do and what it could do accurately. The two tests that taught me it was not to be blindly trusted: First, I had a case where the client had a psychological evaluation, and as part of it she had to turn over documents to the evaluator. She wanted to give the evaluator a deposition taken of the other person in the case. So I had ChatGPT read this deposition — a long one, probably 150 pages — and said, "Read this and generate a summary." You want to give it background on your case when you do that. It generates the summary, and I'm reading through thinking, "My gosh, this is an awesome deposition for us — it's saying this father admits he's not a great father." So I go to check the cites, because I read through this and I don't remember these things. Sure enough, I go to the page and line number, and what it says is not in the deposition at all. Part of that, I believe, is that I probably could have used a better prompt — a deposition transcript tells you who's talking, and I might have needed to tell it who each person is to generate a more accurate result. But it pulled what it found and summarized out of thin air. I'm sure people have heard about lawyers in other states filing briefs straight from AI with no proofreading. That's a horrible idea.

The second thing: I had a case where we were trying to discover whether my client's spouse had committed infidelity. She had hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit cards, and had given us statements for ten or fifteen different cards. It would have cost my client thousands of dollars just for me to go through all of them looking for evidence. So for the initial screen I put it in ChatGPT and said, "Categorize the spending in these statements — household, entertainment, leisure — and if there's anything indicative of an affair, flag it." It goes through the statements, doing these summaries. Then at the end I ask, "All right, what do you have?" And it said — this is ChatGPT, not me — "I don't have in my memory these initial statements that I read." I thought, it would have been nice if you'd told me that beforehand. It wasn't completely inaccurate — I take that back, it was somewhat accurate — but because it couldn't remember the earlier statements, it said there was no evidence of wasteful spending, when I specifically remembered it flagging things in the earlier statements. It wasn't consistently holding on to all the data it was processing. So on a long project like that, you may not actually find out that it's inaccurate or missing something toward the end. It is helpful, but it is not to be blindly trusted.

Collin McKee

That's the scary thing. You'll read it and it will sound exactly right — it'll give you the wrong information with full confidence, like a beautiful story, and you'll have nothing to question. But if you don't verify, it can lead you the wrong way. We've all heard the stories of people walking into a courtroom with full confidence and false information, and the outcomes aren't pretty.

Patrick Williams

My saying for AI and reviewing materials is: treat it like an employee or an associate — but not the one you trust implicitly. Treat it like the employee or associate who may have burned you one time, whose work you need to double-check to make sure it is what it says. And I do believe that even with double-checking, it saves you time. But it is not a plug-it-in-and-send-it-out type of thing.

Collin McKee

I've heard it put a lot of different ways. A new employee — you don't trust them implicitly, you don't leave them alone with your major case and expect a wonderful outcome. You look over their shoulder. So let's make this useful for a solo attorney or small firm with nothing set up. Where should they start with AI tools?

Patrick Williams

I'd say Claude, on the paid plan — that's what we use. It's not too expensive. The only problem I have is token usage; sometimes during busy hours when you're trying to use it, you're not able to. But I'd start there, because it's very conversational, and I love that it will ask you follow-up questions if it doesn't have all the data it needs. I've found it extremely accurate at drafting — if I say, "I have to draft this motion; give me a form motion using this format I've used before, using these facts," I check behind it, but it's far more accurate. It's very rare that I look at it and think, "You just pulled this out of thin air." For a small firm or solo practitioner, it will increase your productivity and save you time. You can't pass those costs along to your client, obviously — our bar, at least in our jurisdiction, says you can't use AI and then bill for the amount of time it would have taken without it. You have to bill the actual time you used. But sometimes as a solo practitioner you have to get something done quickly and as accurately as possible, and you don't have time to spend a day on it. That's where AI comes in handy, and it will help you stay in the hunt and be as productive as some of the larger firms. Another way to handle it from a billing perspective: some things you can do flat fee, and then you can use AI to do it as quickly as you want without worrying about tracking time. It gives you flexibility. It's a resource to fill in the gap for being short-staffed or small, and if you're in that boat you definitely should be using it.

Collin McKee

I like your point that it asks you questions. Fun fact for people who don't know: you can ask it to ask you questions — "don't fill in the blank, ask me about it, ask my opinion" — and it'll have a conversation with you. You framed AI on our first call as a force multiplier, not a replacement. There are still people nervous about AI coming for their job. How do you talk them through that?

Patrick Williams

Some of my staff have felt that. When I mentioned the conversation with my intake coordinator about generating those stats, one of the first things she said was, "Wow, this is doing my job for me." And I said, "It's doing this one facet of your job — but what you need to embrace is that you can use this to do things like this, and then I don't have to." I'd encourage anyone who thinks AI is going to take their job to become familiar with it, embrace it, and use it in your job to be more productive. Since I said that to her, she's come up with new tracking metrics and reports generated with AI that I look at and think, "This is extremely helpful." There's still room to use these tools to make yourself more productive, instead of thinking it's ultimately going to replace you — because I still have to spend time putting prompts in and refining them. It's obviously better than doing these things by hand, and it's awesome if you've got an employee who embraces it and can do these things themselves. So I'd say embrace it.

Collin McKee

Great advice. So where can people find you? Run down the gamut — the course, LinkedIn, websites.

Patrick Williams

Our firm website is batchwilliams.com. For anyone looking for an attorney — one of the things we take pride in is that some attorney websites aren't informative; they say, "We practice family law, call us and we'll answer your questions." Our website takes the opposite approach. We have tons of guides, tons of useful information, and it's written from the perspective that you can do this yourself, pro se, if you read this guide. We try to give very accurate representations of how that stuff works. At the end of the day, a lot of people read it and say, "Your website was very informative, but I don't feel confident doing this myself" — and then they come to us and hire. So if you're interested in how North Carolina law applies to your case, we have tons of useful information there. My course, as I mentioned, is Firm Builder Blueprint at firmblueprint.law. I think it's the most comprehensive modern course out there for young attorneys looking to start their own firm, and even for established attorneys in practice. There are two courses: one for starting your law firm straight out of law school, and one if you're an established attorney looking to go out on your own — with different tools for each. There's a free portion, and I do a newsletter about once a week on individual firm-building topics; all of that is free, so I definitely encourage you to check it out. I'm on LinkedIn. We have an Instagram page, though it's more entertainment than informative — the handle is BPW Law.

Collin McKee

Patrick Williams — the engineer who became a lawyer and never stopped building. Links to the course, his LinkedIn, and all the websites will be in the show notes. And if you enjoyed the episode, own a firm, and want to know how to build workflows and get AI infrastructure going in your firm that actually adds value, that's what we do here at Endeavors AI. I'm Collin McKee, founder of Endeavors AI. Please reach out, and with that we'll see you on the next one.