AI for the Lawyers Who Represent People

Your second chair has read every file. It never sleeps. And it's about to change how you practice.

I'm a trial lawyer who built AI into my own practice — discovery, motions, case analysis, trial prep — and I use it every day in real cases. Second Chair Solutions brings that same advantage to solo and small firms: practical consulting, hands-on training, and custom-built tools, designed around how you actually practice law.

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15+
Years in the courtroom
1,000+
Clients represented
Every Phase
Of a case, covered by tools I built
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The Shift

A New Era of Law

Something has changed, and most of the profession hasn't seen it yet.

For your entire career, the limit on your work was never your thinking. It was the hours. The case theory was there. The motion you wanted to write was there. The cross-examination you could see in your head was there — buried under the sheer labor of getting it onto the page.

That limit is gone. This is a genuine shift in how law gets practiced — and right now, only a fraction of lawyers have noticed. AI doesn't supply the judgment, the strategy, or the instinct for a courtroom. That's yours, and it always will be. What it does is execute — it stands between the lawyer who has the idea and the finished work, and removes everything in between.

The lawyers who define the next decade won't be the ones with the most hours or the largest staff. They'll be the ones who saw this early — who bring the vision, and let their second chair carry the weight.

You can be one of them.
From Practice, Not Theory

What this actually looks like on a case.

This isn't theory. Here's what it looks like on a real caseload, in the practice areas where solo and small firms do their work.

01

Criminal Defense

Every phase of the case
The situation

A criminal file — whatever the charge — runs from the first call to final disposition. Intake. Bail. Discovery. Motions. Negotiation. Trial. Sentencing. Appeal. Each phase its own pile of work, and most of it falls on you.

The old way

Bail arguments written from scratch every time. Discovery read line by line for the issue worth a motion. Plea offers weighed without time to fully model the exposure. Examination outlines, jury research, sentencing arguments, jail-credit math — all by hand, all eating the hours you'd rather spend thinking.

With a second chair — a system built for the whole case
  • Intake & analysis — the file reviewed, charges and elements broken down, strengths and exposure mapped before you finish your coffee.
  • Bail & release — arguments and supporting memoranda drafted in minutes.
  • Discovery — thousands of pages read, cross-referenced, and flagged for every inconsistency and viable motion.
  • Motion practice — suppression, dismissal, and evidentiary motions drafted on your facts and your jurisdiction's law.
  • Plea negotiation — sentencing exposure modeled, offers stress-tested, leverage and mitigation surfaced.
  • Trial preparation — opening and closing frameworks, direct and cross outlines, juror questionnaire analysis, exhibit organization.
  • Sentencing — mitigation arguments, sentencing memoranda, and jail-credit calculations, ready for your review.
  • Appeals & post-conviction — the record reviewed for appealable issues, briefs and petitions drafted on the law that controls.
From the misdemeanor to the most serious felony — the same advantage, at every stage.
02

Personal Injury

From intake to resolution
The situation

A PI matter runs from the first call through demand, negotiation, and — if it comes to it — trial. Records, billing, liens, and an insurer looking for every reason to pay less.

The old way

Medical chronologies built by hand. Demand letters drafted from scratch. The defense IME read and re-read for the overreach. Hours of assembly before any actual advocacy begins.

With a second chair
  • Intake & case workup — the file reviewed, liability and damages mapped, value drivers and weak points surfaced early.
  • Medical records — hundreds of pages distilled into a clean treatment chronology, billing summarized, gaps flagged.
  • Demand packages — persuasive demand letters drafted on your facts, ready to refine and send.
  • The defense IME — the opposing expert's report lined up against the treating records so you know exactly where it's vulnerable.
  • Negotiation & mediation — exposure and settlement posture modeled so you walk in clear-eyed.
03

Family Law

Through the whole matter
The situation

A contested family matter — custody, support, division — moving through disclosure, negotiation, and hearings, with years of financial records and high emotion on every call.

The old way

Disclosures and statements traced by hand for what doesn't add up. Pleadings and parenting proposals drafted from scratch. The financial picture assembled the slow way, every time.

With a second chair
  • Financial disclosure review — bank statements, tax returns, and disclosures analyzed for discrepancies, undisclosed accounts, and patterns worth a closer look.
  • Pleadings & motions — drafted on your facts and your jurisdiction's standards, ready for your judgment.
  • Support & division analysis — the numbers organized and the scenarios laid out so you can advise with clarity.
  • Hearing preparation — examination outlines and the questions a hearing will raise, prepared in advance.
04

Probate & Estate Planning

The document-heavy practice
The situation

Estate administration with its deadlines and filings — or a planning practice producing wills, trusts, and powers of attorney that must be accurate, consistent, and client-specific every time.

The old way

Drafting from templates by hand. Cross-checking each document against the file. Administration steps and filings tracked manually. The same routine work, the same hours, every matter.

With a second chair
  • Document drafting — wills, trusts, and powers of attorney generated from your templates and your client's facts in a fraction of the time.
  • Estate administration — filings, inventories, and deadlines organized and tracked so nothing slips.
  • File review — documents cross-checked against the matter for consistency and completeness.
  • Client intake & summaries — client information turned into clear, organized working documents.

Every example ends the same way — with a lawyer reviewing, deciding, and signing off. AI carries the weight. You still practice the law.

These four are illustrations, not limits. Whatever your practice, the Audit is where we find exactly where this advantage lives in your firm.

Built for Your Practice

Wherever you practice, the advantage applies.

The work changes from one practice area to the next. The problem doesn't — every firm loses the same hours to drafting, review, and the weight of detail. Here's where we start.

Criminal Defense

→

Every phase, from bail to sentencing — discovery reviewed, motions drafted, the whole case worked up before opposing counsel finishes their coffee.

Personal Injury

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Medical chronologies, demand packages, and the defense IME picked apart — so you negotiate from strength.

Family Law

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Financial disclosures traced, pleadings drafted, hearings prepared — the grind handled so you can focus on the people.

Probate & Estate Planning

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Wills, trusts, and filings produced from your templates and your client's facts — accurate and consistent, every time.

Immigration

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Forms, packets, and supporting documentation assembled at speed — so high case volume stops meaning lost evenings.

Bankruptcy

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Schedules, petitions, and document review handled — the repetitive heart of the practice, off your desk.

Employment

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Claims worked up, records reviewed, pleadings drafted — the case built while you build the strategy.

Civil Litigation

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Discovery, motions, and case analysis across disputes of every kind — workers' compensation, malpractice, and beyond.

These are where we begin — not where we stop. The same approach extends to workers' compensation, Social Security disability, elder law, real estate, business and contract work, intellectual property, tax, civil rights, appeals, and any other practice. If your work runs on documents, deadlines, and detail, it runs on the kind of advantage we build. The Audit is where we find exactly where it lives in your firm.

A Path, Not a Product

Start with clarity. Build from there.

Most firms don't need another subscription — they need to know where AI actually creates an edge in their practice. So we start there, and every step earns the next. You go as far up the ladder as makes sense for your firm.

01

The AI Audit & Roadmap

Where every engagement begins. I review how your firm works today — the real workflows, the hours that disappear, the places AI creates leverage and the places it doesn't belong. You receive a written roadmap: clear, prioritized, and yours to keep. It's also where the ethics questions get answered honestly — what's safe, what isn't, and how to protect client confidentiality from day one.

  • Workflow review
  • Confidentiality & ethics assessment
  • Prioritized written roadmap
02

Training

Your attorneys and staff, made genuinely capable — not just handed a login. Practical, hands-on training built around the way your firm actually practices law: the real prompts, the real workflows, the judgment to tell strong output from output you can't trust. Your team leaves confident, not overwhelmed.

  • Live firm workshops
  • Practice-area specific
  • Prompt & workflow playbooks
03

Custom Tools

Where the real advantage is built. Bespoke applications made for your firm and your practice — discovery analyzers, motion and document generators, trial and deposition tools, case workups. Not off-the-shelf software bent to fit you. Tools built around how you already work, scoped from what the Audit revealed your firm actually needs.

  • Built for your workflow
  • Trial, discovery & drafting tools
  • Scoped after the Audit
04

The Second Chair Retainer

Your second chair, kept current. The technology shifts constantly; a retainer keeps your tools sharp, your team ahead of it, and an experienced trial lawyer in your corner as your firm grows. The ongoing partnership for firms that intend to stay in front.

  • Priority advisory access
  • Tool maintenance & updates
  • Quarterly strategy reviews

Not sure which step is yours? It's almost always the Audit. Start there, and the rest becomes clear.

The Story

It started with a vacation rental. It ended up changing how I practice law.

About a year ago, my wife and I were running several vacation rental properties alongside our regular work, and I started using AI to handle the daily grind of it — guest messages, guidebooks, ledgers, the endless small documents. It did that tedious work quickly and well. I noticed.

Around the same time, I kept hearing how lawyers were using AI to draft motions — and getting burned, filing briefs with cases that didn't exist. So I started experimenting myself, carefully, to see what this technology actually was.

I've always been someone focused on efficiency — which surprises people, because the practice of law is one of the least efficient systems there is. The more I researched AI, and watched how fast it was reshaping software, finance, nearly every field, the more convinced I became: this is the most significant technology shift of our lifetimes. For all of history, knowledge was the advantage — the people who had it were the ones who won. AI changes that. It puts the knowledge within everyone's reach.

What I came to understand is that the real question was never knowledge. It's the idea — knowing what result you need and how to get there. That part is still the lawyer's. AI executes it.

The hallucinated-cases problem? My answer is simple. No lawyer would file a motion their law clerk handed them without reading it first. AI is no different — you review its work, every time. The difference is that this clerk has read more than any person could, never takes a day off, and is always available the night before a hearing.

So I put it to work in my own criminal practice. My caseload went up. My results got better — dismissals, acquittals, stronger negotiated resolutions. And I began building my own tools: a criminal defense system that carries a case from intake through disposition. I've used it in the courtroom, during live testimony — analyzing a witness's words in real time, surfacing where their statement on the stand contradicted what they'd said before, generating sharp follow-up questions worded in ways I wouldn't have phrased on my own. No more flipping through a three-ring binder while a witness waits. The answer, in seconds.

When other attorneys saw what I was doing and started asking how, I built Second Chair Solutions — to help them gain the same advantage, and to build the same kind of tools around their practice. Not theory from someone who studied law firms. What actually works, from a lawyer still in the fight.

I've shared more of this story, in my own words →
From the Founder

I've done it. There's no going back.

I spent more than fifteen years in courtrooms — defending people in the hardest cases the system produces, where the stakes were a person's freedom and the margin for error was zero. I know what it is to carry a caseload that never lets up, to lose nights to drafting and discovery, to feel the work expand to fill every hour you have and then some.

Then I put AI to work in my own practice. Not a subscription I bought — tools I built, for real cases, tested against real consequences. And it changed how I practice law. The hours of grinding execution collapsed. The quality of the work went up. The things I always knew I should do on a file — but never had time for — I now had time for.

I'm convinced of something, and I don't say it lightly: this is a genuine turning point for the profession. The lawyers who understand it will practice at a level that wasn't possible before. The ones who wait will find the distance harder to close every month that passes. That's not a prediction. It's what I'm already watching happen.

I built Second Chair Solutions for one reason — so that the lawyers who want this advantage don't have to spend a year figuring it out alone, the way I did. I'll show you what I've learned, build what your firm needs, and do it the way a lawyer would: carefully, ethically, and with your license treated as carefully as my own.

I'll be sharing more of my own experience — the real cases, the specifics, what worked and what didn't — directly, in my own words.

Hear it from me →
Travis Keil signature
Travis Keil
Founder, Second Chair Solutions — Practicing Trial Attorney
Straight Answers

The questions every lawyer asks.

Typing a question into a chatbox is yesterday's version of this. A chatbox answers the question you happen to type — and most lawyers type a simple one. The real skill is engineering the system around it: the structured prompts, the built-in knowledge, the workflows that make AI reason through every angle a careful lawyer would. That's what we build. Your client can ask a chatbot a question too — what they can't do, and what most lawyers haven't learned yet, is build the system that produces a genuinely reasoned answer.

Only if a lawyer files its work without reading it — and no lawyer should. You wouldn't file a motion your law clerk handed you without reviewing it first. AI is no different: you review its work, every time. The difference is that this clerk has read more than any person could hold, never takes a day off, and is available the night before a hearing. The hallucination problem isn't an AI problem. It's a verification problem — and verification has always been the lawyer's job.

No — and understanding why is the whole point. AI doesn't supply judgment, strategy, or the read on a courtroom. What it supplies is execution. The work was never bottlenecked by a shortage of ideas; it was bottlenecked by the hours it takes to carry them out. AI removes that bottleneck. The lawyer with the idea and the overview becomes far more powerful — not replaced. Your staff, freed from the most tedious work, do the same.

Used correctly, yes — and the governing bodies have said so. The ABA and a growing number of state bars have issued formal guidance recognizing that lawyers may use AI, provided they do so consistently with their existing duties: competence, confidentiality, communication, supervision, and reasonable fees. Nothing about those duties is new. AI is simply a tool you must use responsibly — which means understanding what it does, protecting client information, and reviewing its work. Every system we help build is designed around those obligations, not in tension with them.

Confidentiality is protected the same way any sensitive practice decision is — deliberately. There are several proven approaches: running AI models locally, using AI tools that contractually do not retain or train on your data, and obtaining client consent for the use of these tools. The wrong move is pasting privileged information into a public chatbot. The right tools and the right setup keep client data secure — and clients, ultimately, want their lawyer using every capable tool to reach the outcome they're after.

Nothing has changed. A lawyer is responsible for every pleading filed with the court — whether the lawyer drafted it, a law clerk drafted it, or AI assisted in drafting it. That has always been true. The idea that AI introduces some new and unmanageable risk is, more often than not, used to frighten lawyers away from one of the most significant tools the profession has ever had. Use it the way you'd use any draft from any source: review it, verify it, own it. That's not new ground for a lawyer — it's familiar ground.

Not at all. Everything is built for lawyers, not engineers. Training meets your team where they are, and the tools are designed to fit how you already practice — not to turn you into a technologist. You bring the legal judgment. The rest is built around you.

Built-in AI features are generic — one set of tools, the same for every firm, and you bend your practice to fit them. What we build runs the other direction. The tools are made for what you need — your workflow, your practice area, your way of working. Not software you adapt to. Software adapted to you.

Personal injury, criminal defense, family law, probate and estate planning, immigration, bankruptcy, employment, and civil litigation are where we work most — but the approach isn't limited to them. Any practice built on documents, deadlines, and detail can be made sharper with AI. That's the entire purpose of the Audit: whatever you practice, we find where AI gives your firm an edge, then build the path to capture it.

The AI Audit & Roadmap is scoped to your firm and credited toward training or build work if you decide to continue. Training, custom tools, and the ongoing retainer are tailored to what you actually need, after the Audit has shown us what that is. The Audit is the front door, and it's a real deliverable whether or not you go further.

Yes — Second Chair Solutions works with firms nationally. Most engagements run remotely, which keeps them efficient and accessible wherever your firm is. In-person work is available where it makes sense, with travel arranged as part of the engagement.

Take the First Step

Your competition isn't waiting. Neither should you.

Start with a conversation. No pressure, no jargon — just a clear look at where AI fits your firm and what the first step would be.

Book a Consultation → Email Us