AI AN IN-DEPTH REPORT Bill Pierznik has practiced law for more than 20 years. Mostly, he worked as in-house counsel for tech firms, like Act-On Software and Mobilize. But in 2023, he launched Macro Law Group with an eye to dispensing with what he views as some of the outdated norms of his profession. He reached out to Bonnie Page, a colleague he’d known for more than 10 years, and the new firm was born. “I decided it’d be fun to build a law firm using everything that I learned over the past 10 years inside of tech companies and how efficient tech companies operate,” Pierznik tells Oregon Business. “Meanwhile, I was watching law firms still operate the same way they did in 2005, with email, and everything’s in a black box, and billable hours and inefficiencies.” So what does it mean to build a more efficient law firm? Some of it involves using tech tools — some of which are AI-enabled and some of which are simpler automated tools — for tasks that have, traditionally, been tedious and time-consuming, Pierznik says. For example, companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis are developing AI-enabled tools to make legal research easier. Generative AI tools don’t work well for research when given open-ended prompts, he notes, but given an appropriately narrow prompt, they can be incredibly helpful. “What we’re finding out from a legal perspective is — and this is true in a lot of other areas — when you are leveraging AI and telling it, ‘Hey, create me this thing,’ that’s when the hallucinations can happen,” Pierznik says. “It just kind of goes off and starts to make stuff up. And sometimes that’s a good starting point, but you’ve got to do a lot more work. Where the AI in our space is stronger is when I can say, ‘Hey, tell me the current status of the enforceability of non-compete agreements under Kansas law.’ Well, that’s a known fact, right? There are statutes around that, there’s case law around that.” And the new AI tools are not generating documents Suitable Tech How Macro Law Group is using AI — and automation — to upend the way law firms do business BY CHRISTEN McCURDY JASON E. KAPLAN Bill Pierznik of Macro Law Group 40
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