A Letter on Why I Use AI in My Practice

Dear Reader,

I want to be straight with you about something that’s become central to how I defend cases, because I know it’s a divisive topic: I use artificial intelligence in my work, and I think more lawyers should.

I didn’t come to this from a love of technology. I came to it from my own family. A relative of mine spent eight years and saw six specialists, and not one of them could figure out what was wrong with her. Out of something between hope and frustration, I uploaded her medical records to an AI system. In about ninety seconds, it surfaced a possibility no one had named in eight years. A doctor looked into it. It was confirmed. That moment changed how I think about what these tools can do — not replace the expert, but catch the thing the experts, working under time and pressure, had missed.

That is exactly what a criminal case is. A mountain of records, reports, recordings, and timelines — and somewhere in it, the detail that matters. The State has near-unlimited resources to build its case. Most of my clients cannot afford a team of investigators, co-counsel, and expert consultants to answer it. AI helps level that field, at no extra cost to the people who need it most.

Let me be clear about what it does and does not do. AI does not change the facts or the evidence. It cannot, and I would never let it. What it does is help me work through the record faster and more completely — finding gaps and inconsistencies across statements, reconstructing timelines, surfacing issues for motions, sharpening cross-examination, and researching mitigation. It is not the lawyer. It does not make the judgment calls or lead the case. It is my second chair. Every decision, every strategy, and every word that leaves my office is mine, and I’m accountable for it.

There’s also a professional dimension to this. Since 2015, Minnesota’s own ethics rules have expected it. Comment 8 to Rule 1.1 of the Minnesota Rules of Professional Conduct says that to stay competent, a lawyer should keep abreast of “the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” Competence is no longer just knowing the law — it’s understanding the tools that bear on how a case is built and challenged. But most attorneys who have tried AI use it like a chatbot: type a question, read an answer. That’s the shallow end, and it’s useful in only a small fraction of what a defense actually requires. The real value is structural. I’ve built a detailed system to scrutinize every aspect of a case — cross-referencing every police report against every body-cam timestamp, every witness statement against the physical evidence, every officer’s account against their own prior reports — and flagging the contradictions a human reader, working late on a heavy caseload, would miss. When I prepare to cross-examine, that system lets me walk into the room knowing exactly where a witness’s story diverges from the record, line by line, instead of hoping to catch it live. It helps me reconstruct timelines down to the minute, surface the suppression issues buried in hundreds of pages of discovery, and test the State’s theory against its own evidence before a jury ever hears it. That is not a chatbot answering questions. That is a defense built to a standard most clients could never otherwise afford.

This isn’t a fringe idea. Nearly every industry is now actively seeking people with these skills — AI literacy topped LinkedIn’s list of fastest-rising skills for 2025, and the same research projects that about 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change by 2030, with AI a primary driver. The professions that handle high-stakes, document-heavy work are exactly the ones being reshaped. Criminal defense should not be the last to adapt when the people who pay the price for that are clients.

I’m not here to convince you how AI will affect society. I have no idea. What I can tell you, with complete confidence, is that used carefully and ethically, it can make your defense more thorough, more prepared, and more competitive against an opponent with far deeper pockets. That’s not a gimmick. That’s the job.