Building a case involves a lot more more than legal reasoning. Behind every case is a huge amount of admin: organising information, reviewing documents, picking out key details and making sure everything is structured and easy to find.
In clinical negligence and personal injury, a single case can involve thousands of pages of medical records that work can take up a significant amount of time.
This is one area where AI could be genuinely useful. Instead of replacing legal expertise, AI can help with some of the manual work that takes up so much time.
Where does all the admin come from?
Legal teams regularly deal with large amounts of information from different sources.
Before they can use that information, they often need to review it, organise it, categorise it or pull out the details that matter.
On their own, these tasks can seem fairly straightforward. But when they’re repeated across hundreds of cases and thousands of documents, the time quickly adds up.
Technology can help reduce some of that workload.
What tasks can AI help with?
Exactly what AI can do will depend on the system and what it has been built for, but there are a number of tasks where it can help.
These include:
- Organising and categorising information
- Finding relevant details within documents
- Bringing structure to large amounts of information
- Summarising lengthy content
- Highlighting information for review
- Helping with repetitive tasks
The point isn’t to take people out of the process.
It’s to reduce the time they spend on manual tasks, so they can spend more of it on the work that needs their expertise.
Making information easier to manage
Sometimes the problem isn’t finding the information. It’s dealing with how much of it there is.
A legal team might have thousands of pages available to them, but finding the particular detail they need can still take time. AI can help organise and work through large volumes of information, making it easier for people to find and check what they need.
This is especially useful in clinical negligence and personal injury cases, where medical records can come from multiple providers and cover many years.
Making that information easier to work with could save legal teams a considerable amount of time.
More time for work that needs expertise
Saving time on admin isn’t just about getting things done faster. It’s also about where that time can be better spent.
Solicitors bring judgement, legal knowledge, strategy and an understanding of their clients to a case. Manually sorting through documents or extracting information is a very different kind of work.
If technology can take some of that manual work away, solicitors have more time to focus on the parts of a case that need their knowledge and judgement.
AI doesn’t need to replace legal expertise to be useful. It can simply give people more time to use it.
Efficiency doesn’t mean automating everything.
Not every admin task needs to be automated. Some are relatively straightforward. Others are more complex or carry greater consequences if something goes wrong.
How AI is used should depend on the task, the information involved and the impact an incorrect result could have.
Some processes may be well suited to automation. Others will still need someone to check the work or make a professional judgement.
The goal shouldn’t be to automate as much as possible. It should be to find better ways of working.
What about accuracy?
Saving time only matters if you can still rely on the work being done. AI can make mistakes, so speed shouldn’t come at the expense of accuracy or proper checks.
Before using a system, organisations should understand what it has been built to do, how it has been tested and where people remain involved in checking its work.
That’s especially important when dealing with sensitive information, such as medical records.
Why this matters within the medico-legal industry
Clinical negligence and personal injury cases can involve huge amounts of medical information, alongside legal documents and other evidence.
Managing all of that information takes time throughout a case.
Technology can help by making it easier to organise, search and work through that information, reducing some of the manual work involved.
The aim isn’t to remove solicitors, clinicians or experts from the process. It’s to give them more time to focus on the parts of the work where their expertise really matters.
AI Should Make Work Better, Not Just Faster
There’s a lot of focus on how quickly AI can complete a task. But speed on its own doesn’t necessarily make something useful.
The better question is whether it improves the way people work.
Does it cut down unnecessary admin? Does it make information easier to find and understand? Does it free up time for work that needs professional judgement? And are the right safeguards in place?
Those are much more useful measures of whether AI is actually helping.
Supporting Better Ways of Working
At MedBrief, we believe technology should support professional expertise, not replace it.
For clinical negligence and personal injury professionals, that means using technology to take some of the work out of managing complex information, giving people more time to focus on the areas where their knowledge, judgement and experience matter most.