About Second Chair Solutions
I'm Travis Keil — a Minnesota criminal defense trial lawyer of fifteen years. Second Chair Solutions is my consultancy: I help firms bring AI into their practice the way I'm bringing it into mine — developed and tested on the real work, with real stakes. Not from a whitepaper. From the practice. And when a firm needs a tool built for how they actually work, I build it.
Everything here comes from a practice, not a pitch deck.
I run a criminal defense trial practice at Keil Defense in Chanhassen. Over the years I've represented more than a thousand clients — from first-appearance misdemeanors to serious felonies, including serious felony matters tried alongside experienced co-counsel.
I say that first because it's the thing that makes the rest of this credible. I'm not a consultant who read about legal AI. I'm a lawyer who needed the hours back and went looking for them — and the tools I now bring to other firms are the ones I've been building and testing in my own practice.
Why I take this seriously
Someone I love had been unwell for eight years. Tired, cold, foggy — the kind of sick where the labs come back "normal" and no one can tell you why. Six specialists. No answer.
On a hunch, I gathered years of her records — bloodwork, visit notes, imaging — and asked an AI model one question: look across all of this, what pattern do you see? Ninety seconds later it flagged a thyroid marker that had been drifting upward across visits but never quite crossed the lab's reference line, so no single doctor had caught it. The symptom cluster was textbook. She has thyroid disease. She's on medication. She's better.
The AI didn't diagnose her. What it did was hold eight years of records in working memory at once and surface the pattern no one person had been positioned to see. That's the whole thing these tools do well — synthesize, connect, surface what's already in the record. And every lawyer reading this has had a file on their desk they wished they could see all of at once.
How I actually work
In my own practice, I've been building a system around the way defense work actually happens — every stage writing to one record, the system surfacing what moves, and me deciding what happens next. The judgment stays mine. Always. The tools carry the hours. It's a working architecture I'm developing and testing on my own matters, not a finished product I'm selling you off a shelf.
The confidentiality piece is a setup decision, made once: real client work runs on a secure enterprise account — encrypted, no training on my data — and for the most sensitive matters, on open-source models running locally, where the data physically never leaves the machine. That's not a promise I'm hoping to keep. It's an architecture.
The bottleneck was never ideas. It was the hours to carry them out.
That's what Second Chair Solutions is for. It's a consultancy, not a software company. I start where your hours actually go — an honest audit of the work eating your week — then I train your people to use these tools the way I use them, and I stay on as a second chair when you want one. No platform to subscribe to. No system you're locked into. A working lawyer, showing you what works because it works for him.
And when a firm needs something built — a tool shaped around how you actually practice, not how a vendor thinks you should — I build that too. But the tool follows the thinking. The consulting comes first, because a tool you don't understand is just another thing you can't supervise.
I also teach this. The continuing legal education I run for other attorneys — on competence, confidentiality, verification, and the first real step for a firm — is the same material, made public. If you've sat through it, you already know how I think about this. If you haven't, this is the short version.
Let's talk
Credited in full toward your training or build if you continue.