Nine months ago, I left the Department of Justice Tax Division. On the day I said goodbye, I didn’t have a job offer, or even a business plan. Despite that, I didn’t send out resumes or apply to any law firms. I didn’t consider other government positions. But I did receive one unsolicited job offer: my father—an incredible attorney with nearly 50 years of experience—offered me a position at his highly regarded mid-sized law firm in Northern Virginia. It was the easy path. I could have walked into a beautiful office, inherited clients on day one, and had a deep bench of senior attorneys to rely on.

I turned the offer down.

I chose the harder path of starting my own practice from scratch. Why? I saw the disruption that AI was bringing to the legal world, and I knew I needed to build a firm “my way” to meet it.

The Great Legal Divide

I am constantly asking my lawyer friends how they are using AI. Their responses, especially those in mid-sized and small law firms, seem to fall into three distinct buckets:

1. The Non-Users: They aren’t using AI at all, except maybe to ask a chatbot to help plan their family vacation.
2. The Observers: They read the articles and attend CLE seminars on AI, but they aren’t actually incorporating it into their daily practice.
3. The Pioneers: These are the attorneys and firms that are all-in, actively using and experimenting with AI for at least an hour a day to improve their practice.

I truly worry that firms failing to reach that third bucket will be out of business in a few years. But I also believe that the firms that ultimately win this transition won’t necessarily be the ones that spend the most money on technology. They will be the ones that have the courage to rethink their workflows from the ground up.

Starting from Scratch in an AI-Forward World

When I began building my firm in the summer of 2025, I had the unique advantage of a completely blank slate. I wasn’t bogged down by decades of legacy systems. I wasn’t bogged down by tradition or excuses that “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” I learned about AI and built my firm’s infrastructure simultaneously.

Instead of just adding technology on top of an old business model, I made a series of strategic moves to embed it into the firm’s DNA:

• Strict AI Governance: I don’t allow chaotic, ad-hoc tool adoption. Every AI application is strictly vetted for data privacy, security, adherence to attorney-client privilege, and ethical compliance before it ever touches a client file.
• Automated Pipelines: Integrating AI directly into document review processes to instantly synthesize massive amounts of data. This saves me hours a week.
• Supervised Strategy: Using AI as a powerful, supervised tool to accelerate legal research and test legal strategies. (Don’t get me wrong here: you can’t rely on AI to provide legal advice yet. AI gives me bad advice on a daily basis.)
• Lean Administration: Utilizing AI to handle the scheduling, intake, and administrative tasks that historically required a receptionist or assistant.
• Proprietary Intelligence: Building custom training data and prompts based exclusively on my own successful case history and DOJ experience.

For a firm to survive today, they need to look at their operations and ask hard questions: Where are labor costs concentrated? What tasks could be automated? What work do you think will take 30 minutes but consistently drags on for 90 – and could that be solved with AI?

For a firm to survive today, they need to look at their operations from the ground up, like I did. The firms moving faster have figured out that this isn’t about adoption for its own sake; it’s about being early enough to own the decision-making framework.

What This Means for My Clients

All of this behind-the-scenes structuring translates into a direct benefit for my clients.

Traditional law firms often pass the costs of their inefficiencies down to the client. The clients end up paying high hourly fees for what amounts to administrative work or background legal research. The clients pay for hours of manual document review or outdated workflows.

Because my firm is built dynamically for this new AI-forward world, I operate with flexibility and efficiency. AI handles the heavy lifting of data and administration, freeing me up to do what AI cannot do: provide high-level, strategic legal counsel based on my years at the DOJ.

When you hire my firm, you aren’t paying for the old way of doing things. You won’t pay for hours of background legal research that AI can do in minutes. You are getting faster responses, more efficient representation, and a legal partner who is leveraging the best tools in the world to win your case.