What Happened When I Walked Back Into a Courtroom After 10 Years 

I walked into a Georgia courtroom last week for the first time in a decade. I was representing my housekeeper. Her neighbor had sued her in small claims court for $14,000. 

I haven’t practiced in ten years. Normally, I decline to help because it’s hard to dabble in the practice of law. I don’t have the same resources that I had when I was practicing.  

But, I agreed to help her.   

What happened next is the story I want to tell. Not because I won (though we did). But because of what it revealed about what AI legal tools make possible—and what they still can’t do. 

What AI Legal Tools Actually Do 

There’s a lot of noise right now about AI replacing lawyers. Most of it misunderstands what the tools do. 

AI legal tools don’t practice law. They don’t read a room, read a witness, or read a judge. They don’t know when to slow down a cross examination or when to push harder. They don’t feel the moment when the other side overreaches and hands you an opening. 

What they do is compress preparation time dramatically. They surface the law you need, help you organize your approach, and give you a solid first draft of the materials you’d otherwise spend hours building from scratch. They can help you frame your arguments. 

That’s not a small thing. For many lawyers—and for many clients—that compression is the entire ballgame. 

I used Clio Work to prep this case. I want to be specific about what that looked like, because the abstract version of “AI helped me” doesn’t really teach you anything. 

Three Things AI Did in Under an Hour That Would Have Taken Me a Full Day  1. It got me up to speed on Georgia dog bite law in minutes 

I didn’t know Georgia’s specific framework for the issue in the case: dog bite liability. I didn’t know what the plaintiff needed to prove. I didn’t know how the local leash law could establish vicarious liability. I wasn’t clear on what would establish that the plaintiff provoked the dog and precluded liability. Getting current on all of that used to mean hours in Westlaw or Lexis. 

Clio Work surfaced the relevant statutes, the key cases, and the defenses available to us—including how courts have treated provocation arguments specifically. I knew the law I needed to know before I’d finished my first cup of coffee. 

2. It solved my evidence problem in seconds 

My practical question going in was: how do I authenticate and admit a Ring camera video? That’s our key evidence. If I can’t get it in front of the judge, we have a much harder case. 

The authentication question, including who needs to testify, what foundation do I need to lay, what objections should I anticipate, was answered cleanly and quickly. That’s not a small thing. I’ve always prided myself on being prepared for court by anticipating everything that could come up, including how the other side could try to exclude my evidence. The AI tool make this process easier. It even surfaced some arguments that challenged me in a good way.  

3. It built a usable prep structure I could work from 

Clio Work offered to generate a case preparation outline and an evidentiary issues chart. I said yes. What came back wasn’t perfect, but it was a genuine working draft, not a starting-from-zero exercise. 

It also produced a first pass at direct and cross examination outlines for both witnesses. Yes, I edited them. But having a solid skeleton cut the real drafting time significantly. 

Total prep time: around an hour. 

What AI Didn’t Do 

Now, some might assume that if AI can do the research, someone could just use the tool to practice law themselves. I understand the instinct, but here’s why it misses the point. 

AI gave me the research. It did not win the case. 

In that courtroom, I still had to: 

Make real-time evidentiary objections when the plaintiff tried to introduce evidence I didn’t want the judge to consider. The objections came back like riding a bike, but they had to come from somewhere—over a decade of practice, depositions, trials, and pattern recognition about what courts will and won’t allow. 

Read the plaintiff on cross-examination. He was telling a story that the video directly contradicted. I had to build the cross in a way that let the video do the work without giving him an opportunity to rehabilitate himself. That’s a judgment call made in real time, not something any tool generates for you. 

Make the case to the judge. At the end of the day, I had to stand up and synthesize the evidence, the law, and the credibility problem in the plaintiff’s testimony into a coherent argument. That argument lived in my head, not in an AI document. AI tools can help me frame the argument, but ultimately it was mine to stand and make. 

AI legal tools give lawyers the runway to be lawyers again. The skills, the judgment, and the instincts have to already be there. 

The Part of This Story That Matters Most 

My housekeeper gave me the biggest hug when it was over. The relief on her face when the case was decided in her favor was real. That feeling of helping someone never gets old. 

That matters not just as a feel-good detail, but as a structural point about what AI tools make possible for access to justice. This case couldn’t afford a lawyer to spend 10 hours prepping a $14,000 case plus another half-day appearing in court. But my client could benefit from a prepared lawyer who spent one hour preparing. The economics of the case changed. 

This is the conversation the legal industry should be having about AI. Not “will AI replace lawyers” but “can AI make it possible for more lawyers to help more people, at economics that actually work?” 

I think the answer is yes. I saw it in a Georgia courtroom on a Thursday morning in May. 

The Lawyer Still Matters. A Lot. 

Ten years out of the courtroom, I walked in prepared and walked out having won a case for someone who needed it. Not because AI is magic. Because good tools gave a prepared lawyer—even a rusty one—what she needed to show up and do her job. 

That’s the version of AI adoption worth building toward. Not replacing what lawyers do. Giving lawyers back the capacity to do more of it, for more people, at a cost that actually works. 

The judgment, the instincts, the courtroom presence—those still matter. Enormously. The tool just made sure I didn’t have to choose between having them and having the time to use them. 

If you’re a law firm owner watching the AI space and trying to figure out what’s worth your attention, here’s the practical framing: 

The tools that deserve your investment are the ones that compress preparation without compromising quality. Not tools that generate content for you to stamp your name on. Tools that give you the research, the structure, and the first draft so your actual expertise can go into the work that only you can do. 

Clio Work did that for me. It’s one tool we actively recommend and help law firms implement through our AI consulting work at Lawyerist. 

If you’re wondering how to start using AI in your practice—that’s exactly the conversation we have with firm owners. We help you figure out which tools make sense for your practice type, how to train your team, and how to build workflows that allow you to do your best work.