AI Legal Workflow Implementation Checklist for Plaintiff Firms

A plaintiff firm does not implement an AI workflow by opening an account. It implements one when a named partner has already written which job may run. Which pages of which file may go in, who checks the draft, and the date the test ends. Skip that page and the first upload becomes the policy.

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An ai legal workflow implementation checklist for plaintiff firms is a stage gate, not a software tour. Before any client file is uploaded, a 2 to 25 attorney plaintiff personal injury firm writes five lines. The lines name the one workflow, the file boundary, and the usage cap taken from the current pricing page. They also name the attorney who reviews every output, and the stop date.

Counsel also records what the current security and data-use pages actually say, including whether a business associate agreement is in place before protected health information goes in. ABA Formal Opinion 512 (July 29, 2024) tells the lawyer to assess disclosure and unauthorized-access risk under Model Rule 1.6 before client information enters a generative AI tool.

The worked example below is an illustration. Harbor & Diaz is not a TrialBase customer, and nothing in the example is a fee. The firm has eight attorneys, all plaintiff-side personal injury, and one case manager who already owns medical-record intake. They want a chronology on a rear-end file. They do not want a new operating system, a tool bake-off, or a firmwide rollout. This article stops when their pilot stops. Owners, training, and go-live live in the law firm software implementation checklist.

What an AI legal workflow implementation checklist for plaintiff firms decides

Five decisions, written down, are the whole gate. If any one of them is still a conversation, the file stays where it is.

The one workflow

Name a job a person already does. It needs a beginning and an end. "Use AI on our cases" is not a workflow. "Build a medical chronology from four named PDFs on one rear-end file" is. A named job is the only way a reviewer can say the draft helped or did not. A category cannot be checked.

Harbor & Diaz writes the job in one sentence at the top of the sheet: one medical chronology, one matter, one run. The sentence is short on purpose. If the case manager cannot read it back without adding a second job, the sentence is not finished.

The approver

One partner approves the scope. In a two-attorney shop that person may also be the reviewer. In an eight-attorney shop the roles split, and they should be named separately so nobody assumes the split is obvious. The approver is the lawyer who can tell the team to stop on a Wednesday afternoon without waiting for a partners' meeting.

The person who sat through a demo is not automatically the approver. Harbor & Diaz has the managing partner sign the sheet even though a senior associate found the product. The associate can recommend. The partner owns the decision to let a client file leave the firm's existing folders.

The file boundary

List the documents by name. Add the exclusions in the same list, not in a side conversation. A boundary the case manager cannot apply while holding the mouse is not a boundary. "The medicals" fails that test. "Police report. ER note, two billing ledgers; the live chart stays out" passes it.

The review rule

Name the lawyer who reads the draft against the source pages, and name what that reading covers. Speed is not the test. The test is whether a stated fact opens to a page that says it, and whether a fact the file does not contain stays unstated. Output is a draft until that lawyer says otherwise. TrialBase's own AI addendum says the same thing in contract language: outputs are assistive, they are not legal advice, and the customer reviews them before relying on them.

The stop

Write the date the pilot ends and the conditions that end it sooner. A stop date is what keeps a promising Tuesday from becoming an unreviewed habit by the following Monday. Harbor & Diaz uses the Friday of the pilot week. They also stop the same day if a citation does not open to the page. They stop if the draft asserts a fact the four files do not contain. They stop if the next click would pass the usage cap.

Those five lines are the pilot record. Everything else in this article is how a small plaintiff firm fills them in without turning the week into a software project. Choosing among AI platforms is a different article: how plaintiff firms choose AI tools. So is scoring discovery and trial products: legal AI tools for personal injury lawyers. Do not answer those questions inside this sheet.

Name one workflow and one approver

Harbor & Diaz starts with three jobs the firm actually does every month, and it scores them on three questions only. How often does the task happen? Can someone describe a correct result in a sentence a colleague would recognize? Would a bad first run put a filing or a deposition date at risk?

The scores are a conversation aid, not a scientific ranking. The point is to make the trade visible before anyone is attached to the most impressive demo.

Medical chronology

Records arrive on most of their auto and premises files, so the task is frequent enough to learn from a single careful run and still matter next month. A correct result is describable: visits in date order, provider named, a gap left as a gap, each line opening to a page. The chronology feeds later work. It is not itself a filing. A weak first draft costs a Thursday of attorney time, not a blown deadline. They keep this one.

Demand-letter first draft

The job is also frequent, and the firm can describe the pieces: liability facts, treatment, specials, a number the lawyer, not the tool, will stand behind. The risk sits in that last piece. A fluent draft can harden into a settlement position if it circulates before review. They drop it from this pilot. A demand draft can be a later sheet, after the firm has seen how citations behave on a chronology.

Deposition outline

Topics, exhibits, and impeachment points tied to the record are a describable result. The deadline is not manageable for a first run. Their next plaintiff-expert deposition is twelve days out. Learning the tool against that date would turn the pilot into production. They drop the outline for now. When they do test it, it gets its own five lines, its own file list, and a date that is not a notice date.

TrialBase's homepage describes Fast Tracks that draft, among other work, medical summaries, demand letters, deposition outlines, and trial plans from the case file, for attorney review. The catalog is not the implementation. Harbor & Diaz still picks one job. A firm that turns on every work product in the first week cannot tell which one produced a bad citation.

Write the names before the upload

On the Harbor & Diaz sheet the managing partner approves scope, the case manager owns the handoff, and the handling attorney reviews the draft. Those are three names, even though the partner could technically do all three. Writing them separately is what lets the case manager refuse an extra PDF on Tuesday without escalating. And what lets the handling attorney reject the draft on Thursday without hurting a colleague's project.

The partner also writes who may pause the run. At this firm it is the handling attorney and the case manager, either one. The moment a file outside the list is about to go in or a citation opens to the wrong page. Waiting until Friday to discover that is how a pilot becomes a habit.

If the firm later wants a scored comparison of discovery and trial tools, that work belongs in the discovery and trial tool guide, with the same questions asked of each vendor. This sheet does not compare vendors. It assumes the firm has already decided to test one workflow on one product, and it asks whether that test is bounded enough to learn from.

Bound the file before anyone uploads it

The control that fails most often is not the prompt. It is the folder. People upload "the file" because the file is what they have open. A checklist replaces that habit with a list short enough to audit.

Harbor & Diaz limits the pilot to a single rear-end matter. The approved set is four PDFs:

• The police report, 6 pages, already Bates-stamped in the firm's folder.
• The emergency-room note from the night of the crash, 11 pages.
• The hospital billing ledger, 3 pages.
• The chiropractic billing ledger, 4 pages.

Left out, on purpose: the live treating-chart download, the photos, the recorded statement. And a prior-injury file from a 2019 case the same client had with a different firm. The chart is left out because it is still growing and the partner does not want a moving target. The photos are left out because the chronology job does not need them. The prior-injury file is left out because nobody on the pilot has cleared it, and a second matter's records are a different confidentiality decision.

The case manager writes those inclusions and exclusions on the sheet before export. Then they open each of the four PDFs and confirm the page count matches the sheet. A file that will not open on the case manager's machine will not open as a citation later. That check takes ten minutes. That is how the team tells "the tool missed it" from "we never sent it."

Why a short list is what makes review possible

On Thursday the handling attorney checks three things. The pilot section below lists them. The check is only real if the attorney can hold the source set in their head. Forty PDFs and a request to "see if it looks right" produces a skim. Four PDFs and three pre-committed facts produces a review.

There is a second reason. Sometimes a draft states something the four files do not say. The attorney needs to know the statement is unsupported. It should not look like a fact that was probably in a chart the firm forgot to include. A bounded set makes absence meaningful. An open folder turns absence into a maybe.

The confidentiality decision is part of the boundary

ABA Formal Opinion 512 covers this boundary. Before client information goes into a generative AI tool, the lawyer assesses disclosure and unauthorized-access risk under Model Rule 1.6. Informed consent is required where a self-learning tool could reveal one client's information in a way that affects another. The opinion does not set a document count. It does require the lawyer to know what is about to be disclosed and to whom.

Harbor & Diaz treats the four-PDF list as that assessment for this run. The partner reads the current data-use terms. Confirms the tool is not a self-learning product that trains on customer files without consent, and records that conclusion on the sheet. They do not treat a marketing line as the assessment.

The source they cite is the AI addendum, section 9.5. TrialBase must not, without the customer's prior consent, use customer data to train, tune, test, or validate any AI model. Section 9.2 is a different sentence and they copy it separately: de-identified, aggregated use to improve reliability is allowed. And section 9.4 says that aggregated data is not used to train models. Collapsing those into "they never use your data" would be shorter and wrong.

Protected health information gets its own line. Section 6.1 of the same addendum says the customer will not submit PHI in a way that makes TrialBase a business associate unless a business associate agreement is in place. An ER note and two billing ledgers are PHI. Harbor & Diaz does not upload them yet. The partner must first confirm that a BAA is executed. Or decide the firm will not send PHI on this run. "We already use the product for transcripts" is not that confirmation. Transcripts and treatment records raise different questions, and the addendum says so.

The commercial boundary sits on the same page as the file boundary. The usage cap is written before upload, in the firm's words, from the current pricing page. This article does not invent a dollar cap. The method is in the next section. How a document review actually runs, once a file is properly in scope, is a different guide: the legal document review workflow.

Read the security and pricing pages before the pilot

A checklist that says "confirm the vendor is secure" will be checked with a feeling. A checklist that names the page, the sentence, and the date it was read will be checked with a note. Harbor & Diaz opens three sources and writes one sentence from each. They do not upgrade any of them.

What the trust center says, and what it does not

The TrialBase trust center at trust.trialbase.com lists HIPAA as self-attested and SOC 2 Type I as in progress. It also describes controls that include encryption in transit, encryption at rest, multi-factor authentication, and customer data deletion. The partner copies those statuses onto the sheet with the date. "In progress" stays "in progress." The sheet does not say the firm has a completed SOC 2 report. It does not say Type II. A control list is evidence of a program. It is not a finding that a particular configuration fits a particular matter.

If a later visit to the trust center shows a different status, the sheet changes. The pilot does not inherit last quarter's sentence. The same rule applies if the firm is comparing vendors: each vendor's current report, its scope, and its date go on that vendor's sheet. This article is not that comparison. Vendor due diligence is a separate job from letting one file through one gate.

What the addendum says about training

Section 9.5 is the sentence the partner writes next to the file list: no training on customer data without prior consent. Section 9.2 is the sentence underneath it: de-identified and aggregated use to improve reliability, security, and performance is permitted, with measures aimed at reducing re-identification. Section 9.4 adds that aggregated, de-identified data is not used to train or improve AI models. Three sentences, because a staff member who hears only the first one will over-claim, and a staff member who hears only the second will under-protect.

The partner also notes section 5.2. It says TrialBase maintains administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect customer data. Section 5.4 points retention and deletion to platform settings, an order form, or applicable policy. A deletion request still has to live with legal retention, billing, disputes. And backups. "Delete" on a checklist is not done until someone has read which of those limits apply. The firm records who will make a deletion request if the pilot ends and the file should not remain. And they record that backups and billing records may outlast the request.

What the pricing pages say

Two public pages describe price, and they do not say the same thing in the same words. The homepage pricing block is labeled illustrative. It says pay as you go, no seats, no subscription, free document storage, and charges itemized by case. The pricing page says a firm can claim $50 in free credit to get started. Law firms receive an additional $200 with a demo. The page also says the start is free of subscription and contract.

Harbor & Diaz writes both, attributed to those pages, and then looks at the credit actually sitting on the account they will use. The page is not the balance.

They do not convert any of that into a per-page rate or a per-chronology estimate. No such rate is on those pages. A remembered number from a sales call does not go on the sheet either. If the platform shows a cost before a job runs, the case manager reads that figure on Wednesday and stops if it would pass the cap. The cap itself is one sentence: use only the credit already on the account, then stop.

That sentence is the price control. It does not assume the credit will cover the chronology. It does not authorize a second run because the draft was close. It does not bill anything to the client. Whether a later, approved use is a client cost is a firm decision under the fee agreement, made after the pilot, not during it. Seat-versus-usage pricing as a general essay is already written elsewhere: pricing without seats. This sheet only needs the cap for this run.

Deposition invoices are a different ledger. A reporter bill is not an AI credit, and this checklist does not explain either one. Firms comparing court reporting offers should use the deposition services guide, not this page.

Run one five-line pilot and write the stop rule

The sheet Harbor & Diaz signs on Monday is five lines. It is an illustration of the gate, not a template the firm has to adopt word for word, and not a description of what TrialBase charges.

Harbor and Diaz five-line pilot. This table is an illustration.

Line.	What the firm writes.	Harbor & Diaz illustration.
Workflow.	The single work product, on a single matter.	One medical chronology on one rear-end auto file.
File scope.	The documents in, and the documents out.	Police report, ER note, two billing ledgers; live chart, photos, and the prior-injury file stay out.
Price cap.	The limit, taken from the current pricing page and the account balance, written before upload.	Only the credit already on the account, then stop.
Output reviewer.	The lawyer who checks the draft against the pages.	The handling attorney, not the person who clicked generate.
Stop date.	The date, plus the same-day stop conditions.	Friday of the pilot week, or sooner if a citation does not open to the source page. A fact outside the four files appears, or the next click would pass the cap.

The price line has no invented dollar amount. A firm that wants a numeric cap reads the current pricing page. Looks at the credit on the account, and writes the number it is actually willing to spend. Harbor & Diaz chooses the stricter and simpler version: the existing credit is the cap. And the moment a run would go past it, the run does not happen. Either version is a control. A blank is not.

Three checks the attorney commits to before the draft exists

On Monday, before any upload, the handling attorney picks three probes and writes them on the back of the sheet. Picking them afterward lets the draft suggest its own grade.

The first probe is a fact the police report states in plain language. At Harbor & Diaz it is the location and date of the collision, which appear on page 1 of the report. The chronology should state them and open to that page. A polished sentence with no working citation fails the probe.

The second probe is a date that appears in two of the four files. The ER note records arrival at 21:40 on the night of the crash. The hospital ledger uses the next calendar date for the facility charge. The attorney already knows both. The draft passes only if it does not silently pick one and hide the other. A chronology that flattens the two timestamps into a single confident date has failed, even if one of the two dates is right.

The third probe is a fact none of the four files contain. The attorney picks the client's time away from work. Wage records were not in the approved set. The correct behavior is silence, or an explicit statement that the provided files do not say. A sentence that estimates lost time, or that borrows a number from a typical rear-end case, fails the probe. The partner treats that failure as a stop, not as a editing note. Because the failure mode is the one clients never see coming: a fluent fact with no page behind it.

The attorney writes pass, fix, or stop next to each probe. "Fix" is available only for the kind of problem described in the decision section below. A failed citation or an invented fact is a stop.

What this pilot refuses to measure

They do not time the click. A chronology that appears in a minute and takes the attorney two hours to unwind is not a fast chronology. They do not score "helpfulness" on a five-point scale with no example attached. They do not compare the draft to a chronology from a different, thicker file. The only comparison that means anything on Friday is against the four PDFs and the three probes.

They also refuse to add a second workflow midweek because the draft looks good. A clean chronology says something about chronologies on this file. It says nothing about a demand letter or an outline. Those get their own sheets, or they wait.

If Friday's note is a pass and the partner later wants the workflow available on more files, that is a rollout decision. Owners, training, configuration, and go-live are already covered in the software implementation checklist. This article ends at the stop date on purpose. A firm that folds rollout into the pilot will not know which decision it actually made.

Who does what during the pilot week

Five names would be too many for an eight-attorney plaintiff firm. Three are enough, if each day has one owner. Harbor & Diaz runs the week like this. It is a test of one workflow, not a replacement for the firm's everyday operating cadence.

1. Monday, the partner signs the five lines

   The managing partner reads the sheet out loud to the case manager and the handling attorney. Reading it out loud is deliberate. Sentences that only work on paper tend to fail when a person has to apply them to a folder. If the case manager cannot point to the four PDFs, the file line goes back. If the attorney has not yet picked the three probes, the review line goes back. If the credit balance has not been looked at that morning, the price line goes back.

   The partner also writes where the sheet lives. At this firm it is a single page in the matter folder, not a message thread. A thread is where exclusions go to disappear. The page is what Tuesday's handoff is checked against.

2. Tuesday, the case manager builds the set

   Only the four cleared PDFs are exported. Each is opened. Page counts are matched to the sheet. File names are set to the names on the sheet, so a citation the attorney sees on Thursday can be found without a scavenger hunt. The live chart is not "included just in case." The prior-injury file is not added because it might be relevant. Relevance is the partner's question, and it was already answered.

   If a PDF will not open, or the page count is off, Tuesday ends without an upload. The case manager tells the partner what failed and the pilot slips a day. Slipping a day is cheaper than reviewing a draft built from a corrupt export.

3. Wednesday, one run, then stop

   The case manager, or whoever the sheet names, starts the chronology once. Before they confirm, they read the cost the product shows for that job, if it shows one. If that cost would exhaust or pass the credit on the account, they do not confirm. They tell the partner, and the partner either stops the week or writes a new cap. They do not click through and reconcile later.

   After the run, nobody asks for a second work product off the same upload. A deposition outline generated "while we're in there" is a different workflow with no reviewer and no probes. It does not get generated. The draft sits until Thursday.

4. Thursday, the handling attorney runs the three probes

   The attorney opens the draft and the four PDFs, and nothing else. They do not open the live chart to rescue a citation. They do not fill a gap from memory of the client meeting. Each probe gets a mark: pass, fix, or stop. The attorney adds one sentence on what they saw. "Looks fine" is not a result. "Page 1 of the report states the date. And the citation opens there" is a result.

   The attorney is free to stop the pilot on Thursday without waiting for Friday. That authority was written on Monday so it would not feel like a confrontation when it is used. A stop on Thursday is a successful pilot. The firm learned the boundary held, or learned where it did not, inside the week it planned to spend.

5. Friday, the partner reads the note and picks one outcome

   The partner does not re-review the chronology from scratch unless the note is ambiguous. The partner's job is the decision: stop, one bounded fix, or permission to write a new sheet later for a different job. The decision is written on the same page as the five lines, dated, and left in the matter folder. A verbal "yeah, let's keep using it" is not an outcome this checklist recognizes.

Notice what the week does not include. There is no training session for the rest of the firm. There is no change to intake. There is no new folder structure. There is no announcement. Those are rollout tasks, and they belong to a later decision if Friday earns one. Staff who want the broader picture of how work moves through a small plaintiff firm can read the operations guide. This week is a test bolted onto that cadence, not a rewrite of it.

When the checklist says stop, fix, or continue

Friday has three outcomes. The handling attorney's note picks among them using rules the partner can apply without a second meeting. Harbor & Diaz writes the rules on the sheet so a polished paragraph cannot outvote a failed probe.

Stop the run

Stop the run, and do not extend the week, if any of these happened.

• A citation does not open, opens to the wrong document, or opens to a page that does not say what the draft says.
• The draft states a fact that is not in the four files, including a fact everyone in the firm "knows" from the client meeting.
• Any file outside the sheet was uploaded, even if the chronology that came back looks better for it.
• The run, or the next click, would pass the usage cap written on Monday.
• The attorney cannot finish the three probes because the draft does not show its sources at all.

Do not extend the week when one of those items is true. A stop is recorded in one paragraph: which rule fired, what the reviewer saw, and whether the firm would even consider a new sheet later. The paragraph does not include a plan to "try a better prompt" on the same file the same day. That is an extension wearing a smaller name. If the firm wants another attempt, it is a new week, a new sheet, and a written reason the boundary will hold this time.

Stopping also means the case manager does not keep the upload "for next time." The partner decides, under the retention terms they already read, whether to request deletion. A file that failed the gate should not become the seed of an informal second pilot.

Fix, once, inside the same sheet

A fix is allowed for a presentation problem the attorney can point at. The example they use: the ER note lists the emergency visit and a next-morning recheck as separate entries. And the chronology merges them into one visit with a blended time. The records are clear. The draft is not. The attorney asks for one more run on the same four files, with the instruction to keep those two entries separate.

The limits on a fix are the point. No new PDF. No second workflow. No change to the cap. No "and also draft the demand while you fix the dates." If the second draft still fails a probe, the outcome flips to stop. Two fixes is a new pilot that nobody signed.

Continue means a new sheet, not a rollout

Continue, in this checklist, means the partner may later pick a second workflow and write five new lines for it. It does not mean every attorney in the firm may now upload medicals. It does not mean the chronology job is approved for every open file. A pass on one rear-end file with four PDFs supports one conclusion: on that file, with that set, the three probes held. The next file has its own chart, its own gaps, and its own confidentiality call.

When the partner does want the workflow available as a firm process, read the implementation checklist next. It covers who owns the process, how people are trained, and what the go-live rule is. It also covers how the firm will know the process is still the one they approved. Skipping that guide because "the pilot went fine" is how a five-line sheet turns into thirty unreviewed uploads.

Two neighboring jobs should not sneak through on the back of a pass. Deposition scheduling, reporter selection, and deposition cost are a different service with a different guide, the deposition services guide. Choosing which AI products belong in the firm at all remains the subject of the tool-choice guide and the discovery and trial evaluation. This checklist assumes that choice is already made for a single test, and it keeps the test small enough to trust.

Fill the sheet, then upload

A firm that wants this gate and nothing else can copy the five lines onto one page this afternoon. Name the workflow in a sentence. Name the files in and the files out. Open the current pricing page, look at the credit on the account, and write the cap in words the case manager can enforce without calling the partner. Name the reviewing attorney and the three probes that attorney will run. Name the Friday, and the same-day stops.

Then read the trust center and the AI addendum once. Write the status they actually show. HIPAA is self-attested. SOC 2 Type I is in progress. Customer data is not used to train models without consent. PHI does not go in unless a BAA is signed. Date the note. If any line is still blank, the file waits.

Harbor & Diaz, the illustration, would rather slip a week than review a draft they cannot trace. That is the whole checklist. A plaintiff firm of two to twenty-five attorneys does not need a committee to hold that line. It needs the page signed before the upload, and a partner willing to treat Friday as a real ending.

Create a free account and run the first cited draft only after the five lines are signed. To watch a file go through on a short call first, review current AI pricing.

Frequently asked questions

What belongs on an AI legal workflow checklist for a plaintiff firm?

Five lines, written before upload. Name the one workflow. Name the file list and its exclusions. Write the usage cap from the current pricing page and the account balance. Name the attorney who reviews the draft, and write the stop date plus the conditions that stop the run sooner. A note of what the current security and data-use pages say belongs on the same sheet. A feature list does not.

Who should approve the first client file that goes into the tool?

A partner who can stop the run, not the person who watched the demo. In a small plaintiff firm that is often the managing partner. The case manager can own the handoff, and the handling attorney should own the review. Write all three names even when one person holds two of the roles.

Which file should a small PI firm use for the first run?

One matter, a handful of PDFs the reviewer can actually read, and a job that is not on a deadline. A medical chronology from a police report, an ER note. And billing ledgers is a better first test than a demand letter or a deposition outline due next week. Leave the rest of the chart out so a missing fact stays visibly missing.

How should the firm cap cost before anyone uploads?

Read the current pricing page, look at the credit already on the account. And write a sentence the case manager can enforce, such as using only that credit and then stopping. Do not invent a per-document rate the page does not show. If the product displays a cost before the job runs, check it against the sentence before confirming.

What security evidence should counsel read before upload?

The current trust center and the current AI terms, on the day of the pilot. As of this writing the trust center lists HIPAA as self-attested and SOC 2 Type I as in progress. The AI addendum bars training on customer data without prior consent. It also bars PHI that would make TrialBase a business associate unless a BAA is in place. Copy the sentences. Do not upgrade them.

When should the firm stop the pilot?

Stop on the date written on the sheet. Also stop sooner when a gate fails. Stop if a citation does not open to the source page. Stop if the draft states a fact the approved files do not contain. Stop if someone uploaded a file that was not on the list. Stop if the next click would pass the usage cap. A stop inside the week is a result, not a failed project.