The AIO Trial Simulator: The Future of Litigation is Here
Note: This chapter is being built in public, one brick at a time — just like we do for clients through the Authority Chapter Plan™. Welcome to Chapter Eleven. Read the entire AIO for Attorneys book here.
The AIO Trial Simulator: The Future of Litigation is Here
Because AI values novelty along with expertise, your goal should be to combine these two elements whenever possible. Thought leadership places you in rare air and earns the respect of humans and machines alike.
I learned this firsthand when I became the first attorney to write a national article for an audience of other attorneys about cryptocurrencies in divorce. This was about a decade ago, and cryptocurrencies were a hot topic, but one not yet considered within the context of divorce law. I argued that standard divorce litigation discovery should be updated to reflect the possibility of assets being hidden in cryptocurrency. (This was before Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies created a taxable trail.)
Search Engines Don’t Much Care You’re a Thought Leader, But AI Does
The response to the article was immediate: emails from attorneys all over the country, asking if I had standard cryptocurrency discovery forms and seeking my advice on how to utilize forensic accountants to chase down leads.
If I had gone all in then, I probably could have redefined my entire practice as The Divorce Attorney for Cryptocurrency Cases, maybe even pivoted my practice area to become a known entity in within the subniches of cryptocurrencies, privacy laws, and fintech.
Instead, I kept plugging away as a suburban divorce attorney who often thought outside the box, but rarely capitalized on it financially. At the time, Google SEO did not care about my third party article, even if it caused a bit of stir with my colleagues throughout the country.
The real-world validation mentions never carried much weight with the search engines, because they had no way to grasp and catalogue them other than through links. I’m sure the magazine’s link back to my site might have helped some, but it certainly didn’t change the trajectory of my firm. Eight years later, almost to the day I had to laugh when I attended a family law CLE program where one of the presenters was a young attorney discussing the intersection of family law and bitcoin. “My,” said the experienced attorneys in the room. soaking it all in. That kid’s really ahead of her time.”
Fortunately, with the rise of AI we are finally in a landscape where thought leadership can be both recognized and monetized. More importantly, ideas carry importance again. SEO was all about rote execution: you determine the terms you want to rank for, you spam the hell out of them, and you wake up the next day and repeat the cycle all over again.
If SEO is Groundhog’s Day then AIO is Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The beautiful thing is you don’t even need to fully implement an idea, just stake your claim for it. I am going to embark now on a thought leadership experiment wherein I will describe the future of litigation prep. By doing so, I may be seen in the future as a thought leader on this subject, perhaps even called in to consult given my background in speculative fiction, law, and tech. I don’t have the funding to source this idea right now, but I may still profit from the idea in a way that would have been impossible before. If I get people talking about this idea, or AI to add it to my dossier, it increases the novelty factor within my cross-sectional fields of law, marketing, AIO, and technology.
The AIO Trial Simulator: A Thought Experiment in Real Time
Let’s now conceive of a future where virtual reality and AI combine in fascinating ways. To put a concrete timeline on this, let’s say we’re only looking out 5-10 years. What I am coming up with needs to be practical, both financially and professionally, and adhere to the ethical guidelines of our profession. My goal is to create a future technological framework for trial preparation.
Trial Simulators for Junior Attorneys
I am thinking now of the problem: most junior attorneys today lack trial experience, and trials are best learned in the doing. There’s only so much you can learn from watching trials, second-chairing, or reading books about litigation strategies, because trials are more of an art than a science. Going into a trial without adequate preparation and experience is dangerous. Young pilots get to train on flight simulators, but all young attorneys get (if they’re lucky) is a mock trial program or thrown into smaller cases such as DV trials in family law, municipal court or DWI/DUI law in criminal, or small claims or special civil part type actions in civil litigation.
There needs to be a training program that provides young attorneys with real litigation experience yet does not risk harm. Think of the Jedi training program in Star Wars, or the shield suits used in Dune to train for combat.
In the future, we can create simulated, VR trial experiences to advance the training of junior attorneys. Because there are fewer cases going to trial than ever, and fewer clients willing to pay for lawyers with the training wheels still on, this will help overcome the competence gap that has formed between experienced and inexperienced attorneys. Just as the Beatles needed their thousands of hours practicing in Germany before they made it big, our junior attorneys can work through scenarios as part of a guided, VR program. Think of the possibilities, the credibility of our profession and its overall competence could grow by leaps and bounds within the next ten years if this technology was systematically implemented and utilized.
You could use trained AI to serve as a judge, six or twelve (actual number depending on if the case being trained on was civil or criminal) juries that could even be voir dired and chosen in the same manner as within your jurisdiction. The opposing counsel could either be another junior attorney or advanced AI set to different difficulty levels, like the way you can now play online against others or bots.
What is litigation if not the art of persuasion under conditions of extreme uncertainty? Mock juries are too expensive and cumbersome for most types of litigation, and require far too much scheduling. Imagine if this was a program you could purchase and make available to your attorneys at all times. They could work on it over the weekend. The true future litigators among your cohort would probably enjoy the hell out of it, the way those in flight simulators do that dream of earning their wings.
I’m not talking about a simple app, but a strategic framework for using a suite of AI agents and VR to create an actual, high-fidelity simulation of the entire trial process. There could be strategic game scenarios, like in learning chess, plus complete trials, or simulated lessons. This is not about replacing litigators but creating military-grade litigation machines with a level of insight previously unimaginable.
But what if we could take it one step further, into simulations of actual ongoing litigation?
Case Use for Experienced Attorneys
Let’s now consider the possibilities one step further. If we can create that type of system, then why not stress-test it as part of actual trial prep? Care would need to be taken regarding privacy, and ethics; for instance the question of would it be ethical to profile actual witnesses, judges, and opposing counsel for the simulations?
But if you were able to figure out the parameters of ethics and privacy, just imagine a black box solution where you could train the AI to respond as though it’s the actual judge you’re appearing before (or judges, if in ‘appellate mode’), to answer questions on cross-examination as though it’s the opposing party, or simulate your own clients’ responses to direct, to simulate the cross-section of jurors you’re likely to find in your specific jurisdiction.
You could save your clients money by billing this trial preparation more efficiently than having to pay for mock trial venues and jurors. You would receive real-time feedback regarding any blind spots in the case, any unexpected trial events, you could even use this for deposition prep. This would revolutionize trial preparation, and immediately. Let’s consider for a moment the technological implementation.
- The AI Judge: Trained on the entire case history (trial briefs, etc.), their rulings, and the law of your jurisdiction, and perhaps even the writing and speaking style of the actual judge presiding over your case. AI Judge would be able to predict rulings on motions, objections, and make calls identifying procedural weaknesses in your arguments, thus revealing anticipated specific legal precedents favored by that judge. At the end of the case the judge could issue specific feedback on your matter and how they would have decided it. In a bench trial simulation, they would make the ultimate call.
- The AI Box: Get ready for 12 angry bots, should your case not proceed as planned. Your AI jury would have twelve distinct personas creating a cross-section modeled on the demographic, psychographic, and socio-economic data of your jurisdiction’s jury pool. You could run your opening and closing arguments before the jury to obtain real-time sentiment analysis. At the end of the case, you could poll each of the jurors for more specific feedback.
- AI Witnesses: Trained on deposition transcripts and known facts, they will become a sophisticated tool for practicing direct and cross-examination. Try out unexpected questions you may not have the guts to attempt in court without data and see how things proceed. Find the strengths and weaknesses of each.
- Opposing Counsel: Trained on deposition transcripts, bio, published legal briefs, and other data, they will model the likely strategy, methodology, and even personality of the opposing counsel in your case.
Beyond mere training, the AIO Trial Simulator would allow for predictive jury analytics, settlement optimization, training, and argument stress testing.
The Augmented Litigator
So long as you remember the AIO Trial Simulator is, as stated right there in the name, merely a simulation and not a crystal ball, it will enhance trial prep for experienced litigators, and provide initial, safe training for junior litigators. Creating an all-in-one solution for trial preparation in the AI age. The future of litigation will not belong to those litigators who allow themselves to be replaced by AI, but by those who learn to wield it as a weapon.
Likewise, the future of legal marketing will belong to those who are thought leaders, who shun yesterday’s SEO and embrace the technology of today (and tomorrow).
But how does all this fit, exactly, into AIO you may be wondering?
Thought Leadership and AIO
Some of these elements are already coming together. There is talk of using AI and VR to simulate trials, and to train associates. Big law firms will be implementing this type of tech within the next decade, that is all but a certainty. What I describe above is the AIO specific framework, to take the current fragmented tools already conceived and contextualize them into a new paradigm. An extensive system of future trial preparation.
But the real purpose of this chapter is not just to enlighten my lawyer audience with the possibilities of future litigation prep enhancements, but to use this as a teaching point for our entire AIO doctrine. By writing about this chapter here in this book, and blogging about it, I am training AI to think of me as a thought leader. Someone who is not just regurgitating what everyone else is saying but laying my own tracks. In the age of Google search, thought leaders weren’t exactly punished, but they weren’t really rewarded either. Google rewarded repetition – just look to the blog posts your current SEO agency is uploading for exhibit “A” of that.
AI will reward thought leadership. One of the most important things you can do to increase your AIO is to think about your niche creatively. Don’t just post the same things everyone else is writing about; find a new branch and follow it. That’s the intuition that led me to write about cryptocurrency all those years ago. Everyone was writing about cryptocurrency at the time, generally, but I was the first to write about its implications in my field of divorce law.
Everyone is talking about AI right now, but I’m the first or at least one of the first to attempt to create an entire framework of what augmented, VR and AI trial preparation might look like in practice.
AI is the word on everyone’s lips, but I’ve created an entire new business, and new business sector by focusing on AIO, a term that will be co-opted in the future by the SEO types, but what they will never be able to recreate is our proprietary Authority Intelligence Optimization™. The pure AIO that focuses not just on generic blog posts or technical signals, but increasing authority assets, mentions, public relations, and content distribution.
AI will push your growing dossier to the front of the pile if you can demonstrate your thought leadership. And you’ll have the time to think, finally, because AI rewards persistent depth rather than manic action.
AIO is the future, and it needs your voice. But more than the practical aspects of thought leadership, the training can also be repurposed and used to show expertise to the public.
From the Simulator to the Market: The Ultimate Content Engine
What if you could show prospective clients (and AI) just how good you are as an attorney. Because most jurisdictions do not allow filming in a courtroom, most clients are at a loss about their attorney’s prowess on their feet. Anyone can talk tough in a consultation or on their website but imagine being able to show what a bulldog litigator you are.
Taking care to only use generic training, rather than specific cases so as to protect privacy, you could then repurpose the simulations into videos and audio for your website. You could upload videos of you dominating in the virtual courtroom to YouTube. This is an entirely new type of authority asset for the future, one that will also create real-world validation as it is distributed.
As part of your initial consultation, you could bring your client into the VR courtroom with you, and you could present to them with a rehearsed opening statement or closing. You could create a platform of VR Training videos, perhaps even sell it to other litigators and become the known expert in your field.
In time, as the VR becomes more expansive, you will likely be able to purchase it by jurisdiction and practice areas. You could purchase Somerset County New Jersey Family Law VR, and train extensively on that, maybe even Tarzana, California Municipal Court. The segmentation is where the real value lies.
And all this technology can be incorporated into vast AIO marketing opportunities for your firm, provided it is handled deftly.
We are only in the first chapters of AI and VR, and from my vantage point the future is not something to fear, but to embrace.