How Fisher Phillips Scaled Legal AI Across 40+ Offices

Raising the Bar

As a tech-forward and AI-forward law firm, Fisher Phillips knew that the full potential of GenAI was not always being met by their initial suite of tools. 

Unrealized Potential

The first opportunity was moving past the rigid limitations of earlier GenAI tools, which offered a fixed list of skills and captured only a fraction of AI’s true potential. To unlock that value, Fisher Phillips wanted the flexibility to define and expand its own custom AI use cases and skills.

We’ve always tried to not only have the best and smartest attorneys, but also have the best, most advanced, most innovative technology to help those attorneys do their job.

Further, Fisher Phillips wanted an AI platform that could understand their attorneys’ work, anticipate next steps, and proactively guide their attorneys toward appropriate and advantageous use cases and possibilities – without the attorneys even needing to ask for them. They wanted a legal AI that could do the work and help them figure out where to start, what to ask, and how to get the most out of it

Scaling Consistency

The second opportunity was structural. Fisher Phillips operates across more than forty offices. Clients expect high quality, consistent work product whether their matter is handled in Atlanta or Irvine, by a third-year associate or a senior partner. Maintaining that standard was something their original AI tools had not yet reliably solved. 

“We never want to be in a scenario where a client loves the work that we do in one office,” Shenkman said, “but feels the style or tone is inconsistent when prepared by another office.” And he hoped the AI platform Fisher Phillips selected could help with that as well. 

AI Built for the Best

Fisher Phillips found both answers in Clio. First, Vincent by Clio showed their attorneys what AI was capable of. Then, Vincent Studio let them customize and operationalize those capabilities. 

Showing Attorneys What’s Possible

Fisher Phillips adopted Vincent by Clio after Shenkman encountered an early prototype and recognized it as something unique. Vincent’s ability to support open-ended prompting, surface relevant tasks from uploaded documents, conduct multistate research, and connect AI directly to case law, statutes, regulations, and dockets all left a strong impression on Shenkman. He decided to get Vincent into his attorneys’ hands as soon as it was ready. 

With a lot of tools, you’ll be very excited after the demo but you’ll be underwhelmed when you deploy them. With Vincent, we were really excited after the demo, we were really excited when we piloted, and we’ve been really excited now that we’ve had it deployed for a long time at our firm.

Beyond freestyle drafting, what changed the game was how Vincent showed attorneys what to do next. Instead of waiting for the attorney to come up with the right prompt, Vincent proactively guided them. Upload a complaint and Vincent suggested relevant next steps, like drafting an answer, generating a list of questions for the client, or identifying documents to seek out. Vincent also prominently displayed its list of pre-vetted and customized workflows directly under its chatbox, so attorneys could quickly perform a specific task with just the click of a button. The full range of GenAI use cases and possibilities surfaces automatically, removing the guesswork that kept so many attorneys inside their comfort zone. 

“One of the things that really makes Vincent stand out is the task suggestions,” said Stacy Rushing, Fisher Phillips’ Director of Knowledge Management and Legal Analytics. “It suggests things that people wouldn’t even think to use AI for.” 

For Sarah Wieselthier, a partner in the firm’s New Jersey and New York offices, Vincent changed how she approaches matters from the first moment a client asks her a question. 

“I can put that question into the AI tool and I can see right away, within a few minutes, Vincent will take all the relevant authorities and give me an analysis and an assessment,” she said. “I can then take that information and dig deeper.” 

And Sarah doesn’t have to wonder about what sources are supporting Vincent’s answers. “I have confidence that the dataset and the source we’re using is just the case law. It’s just the statute. It’s all of the same things that I would look at if I was doing research on my own.” 

I have confidence that the dataset and the source we’re using is just the case law. It’s just the statute. It’s all of the same things that I would look at if I was doing research on my own.

Bottling Their Best Work

While Vincent by Clio gave Fisher Phillips a powerful foundation, Vincent Studio let them build on it and operationalize it. Fisher Phillips was an early tester for Studio, and the team worked hand in hand with the Studio product team to shape the version of the tool that was ultimately released in the market. Stacy Rushing’s Knowledge Management (KM) team began designing custom workflows that reflected Fisher Phillips’ own guidance, documents, and standards. They started simply, by rebranding an existing out-of-the-box workflow to make it feel like theirs, then expanded. 

“It’s almost like we built a tool in-house without having the development team to do that,” Rushing said. 

Today, some of their most used workflows include a position statement builder for Equal Employment Opportunity charges, drawing on the firm’s own documents, and a workflow for finding inconsistencies across discovery responses. 

Then, they created workflows branded to individual clients, incorporating each client’s preferred terminology, formatting expectations, and ways of doing business. “We have some that are branded for specific clients and bring in client preferences and terminology, and we market those to our clients,” Rushing said. “We let them know, ‘we’re using something that was built and customized to you and your way of doing business.’” No generic AI tool can replicate this level of differentiation. 

Vincent Studio also became an unexpected training ground for junior attorneys. Wieselthier described running a discovery response through a Studio workflow with a first-year associate who had never handled discovery before. Vincent flagged inconsistencies and potential deficiencies, and she sent that output to the associate as a starting point. 

“The Studio flows can be a good training tool for the associates,” she said, “because we’ve sort of programmed it in a way that it knows the best practices and what someone should be looking for.” 

For Evan Shenkman, Vincent Studio also addressed the firm’s consistency challenge. With client-specific workflows pre-trained on Fisher Phillips’ exemplars and published to every attorney working on that clients’ matters, the work is always aligned with what that client expects. 

“We can have a higher level of consistency, a higher level of quality because we’ve already, essentially, pre-trained Vincent to do things in a way that that client loves,” he said. 

My team was pretty clear that you can’t take this away from us now. We’re relying on this.

Excellent Attorneys With a Head Start

Getting attorneys to move beyond the default chat box meant showing them what is possible. When Fisher Phillips attorneys engaged with Vincent’s workflows, the reaction was disbelief, then delight. Rushing compared it to watching a kid open their first Christmas present. 

Once they had accepted Vincent’s capabilities, they didn’t want to practice without it. When the Studio beta period ended, the decision to purchase was easy. 

“My team was pretty clear that you can’t take this away from us now. We’re relying on this,” Rushing said. 

With Studio workflows serving as the starting point for any given matter, quality improves. “I think with standardization comes, essentially, consistency. A high quality of work no matter what office is performing that work, no matter what attorney is performing that work,” Shenkman said. 

For Sarah Wieselthier, the shift shows up in every phase of the case, accelerating her judgment through research, drafting, discovery and deposition prep. “It’s a really good launching pad for the next steps in my process, when I go through the discovery and litigation of a case.” 

Fisher Phillips already had exceptional attorneys. Now, Vincent by Clio has given them an AI-powered head start.