Back to Brains: Filevine’s Michael Anderson on Smart Pens, Voice Agents, and Getting Lawyers Off the Keyboard
I sat down with Michael Anderson , Chief Product Officer at Filevine, at the LEX Summit in San Diego, where attendance topped 2,000 this year. I wanted to start with his "Back to Brains" article , which argues that lawyers spend too much time pointing, clicking, and typing to get software to do what they already know they want. Filevine announced the LOIS pen and notebook at the conference. It is a real pen with real ink on real paper, and a sensor sends the handwritten notes into the meeting transcript, so a litigator in a client meeting or a focus group can keep eye contact and still capture the thought. Michael calls the legal professional the hero of the story. That is also why LOIS has dictation and readout, since he says the best case-strategy ideas tend to show up when you're on the go. The law librarian in me had to ask about the citator . John Rizner demoed it for us earlier (Marlene and I assumed it would go over most people's heads, until two partners from my firm told me it was the greatest thing they had ever seen). Case results get a green check mark when the citation is verified, or a magnifying glass when something needs a second look. Claims about what an opinion says link to the passage that supports them. You can then highlight a specific holding and run what Michael called a semantic Shepardization of that text across the full corpus of U.S. case law. It uses machine learning to look for similar language, so it can surface cases that address the same point without citing the original, including sub silentio treatment. For people outside the profession, Michael uses Spotify to explain it. Most of us let it recommend songs based on what other listeners picked, and sometimes you want to ask for pop songs with a cello. We also talked about acquisitions. Filevine bought a deposition marketplace that schedules digital court reporters and paired it with its own live deposition feedback tool, which flags when a deponent says something inconsistent with earlier testimony or with a document in the case file. Pincites brings the work into Microsoft Word. Michael's reason litigators pick these tools up is that "intelligence is always competitive," and one fact your opposing counsel doesn't have gives you a chance to win. He also said something that matches what I see at my firm. Eight years ago he ran SaaS implementations where the main job was getting staff to use the system, and he has been surprised at how quickly attorneys have taken to AI by comparison. He credited Jack Newton with the line that LLMs are to attorneys what spreadsheets are to accountants. The headline announcement was voice agents that answer inbound calls to the firm. In the live demo on stage, the agent took a call, identified the caller, followed the firm's decision tree, and put the data into the intake system. Setup uses what most firms already have, such as the script you would hand a new front-desk hire or the configuration in a system like Lead Docket. When I asked about guardrails (I still think about the Air Canada chatbot ), Michael said the agent works from the same process documents a new intake employee gets, and that employee doesn't have full case access either. He told a story about calling several law firms about a real estate matter and getting voicemail every time, with no callbacks. He also pointed to the California State Bar's Justice Gap Study , which shows how many Californians with legal problems never get the help they need, and he sees the after-hours, overflow, and voicemail calls as the place to start. Listen on mobile platforms: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Substack Email : geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com Music : Jerry David DeCicca
