AI
What AI Is Actually Good For in a Case
AI is good at reading faster than you and bad at knowing when it’s wrong. Give it the first job and never the second.
The useful frame is this: AI is a very fast assistant with no judgment and no accountability. Everything it produces has to be checked by someone who knows the case. Once you accept that, there’s real work it does well.
Where it earns its keep
Reading a large document set
Two hundred pages of bankruptcy schedules, a deposition transcript, a year of bank statements, a stack of permits. AI will read all of it in a minute and answer questions about it.
Ask narrow questions: “list every financial institution named anywhere in this document, with the page number”. Then verify each one against the page. You’ve turned two hours of reading into ten minutes of checking.
The page-number requirement is the important part. It makes verification possible and it makes fabrication obvious.
Building a timeline
Feed it dated material and ask for a chronology. It’s genuinely good at pulling dates out of unstructured text and ordering them.
This is where contradictions surface — two documents placing the same person in two places, or a gap where something should be.
Normalising messy data
Address lists in four formats, names entered inconsistently, a spreadsheet somebody maintained badly for six years. Cleaning that by hand is a day; it’s a minute here.
Same for converting a scanned table into something you can sort.
Drafting the boring correspondence
Records requests, follow-up letters, appeal letters, status updates to a client. A first draft in seconds that you then edit.
See using AI to draft a records request for what to fix before it goes out.
Explaining an unfamiliar area
Working a state you don’t know, or a record type you haven’t used. Asking for an orientation is a fast way to know what questions to ask next.
Then verify every specific against the primary source. Use it to know what to look up, never as the answer.
Summarising for a client
Turning your working notes into a readable update. You supply the facts, it supplies the prose.
Never the reverse.
Two rules that keep you out of trouble
Never put client-identifying information into a consumer AI service. Names, addresses, account numbers, case details. Assume anything you type may be retained and may be used for training unless you have a written agreement saying otherwise. Redact or anonymise before you paste.
Nothing AI produced goes into a report unverified. Not a date, not a citation, not a name, not a legal proposition. You’re accountable for the contents of your report and “the AI said so” isn’t a defense — it’s an admission.
See what AI gets wrong for the specific failure modes worth knowing.
Go deeper
AI Essentials for Investigators
Using AI to sift through large amounts of data quickly, improving what you gather from social media, spotting patterns and connecting dots, and hands-on with tools that improve and unblur images for clearer evidence. Only basic internet skills needed. $49.99.
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