At Hones Law, AI handles research, not client updates
Edward Hones is an employment lawyer and the founder of Hones Law PLLC, a Seattle firm that represents workers in workplace matters including discrimination, accommodation denials and retaliation. The conversation explores where AI saves attorney time, why client updates stay personal, and how plain-language answers are changing first conversations.
AI can save time on legal research and website audits, but client updates call for a human touch when people are dealing with job loss. Be specific about who you serve, answer clients’ real questions plainly, and do not let AI write public content where accuracy and trust are essential.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I founded Hones Law PLLC in Seattle to represent workers and nobody else, particularly people who have been targeted because of a disability, gender, race, age, national origin, sexual orientation, or another protected characteristic or activity. Most of the firms a worker will compare us to take cases on both sides, so a worker has to wonder whose interests the firm really serves. We never have that problem. Everything about the firm is built for the person who has just been fired, denied an accommodation, or retaliated against.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of it comes from referrals and from the credibility we’ve built by giving reporters timely commentary on workplace issues, which brings in people who already trust that we understand their situation. I’d like more of it to come from other attorneys and community organizations that see people early, since the sooner we hear from someone, the more options they have.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I’ve handed over the first pass of legal research and audits of our existing web content, which frees attorney time for client conversations and strategy. I went back to doing client updates myself. A drafted version came out technically correct but cold, and when someone has just lost their job, how a message sounds matters as much as what it says.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes. People arrive better informed, often because they’ve already read something that explained their situation, so I spend less of the first call on basics. A few have mentioned finding us through an AI assistant before they reached our site directly. It’s still a small share, but it’s growing, which is why we rewrote key pages around the plain-language questions people actually ask.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I’d tell them to get specific about who they serve, write plain answers to the real questions their clients ask, and send short, regular updates so clients never feel forgotten. I’d tell them to ignore the pressure to be visible everywhere or to let AI write their public content. In a field where accuracy and trust are the whole product, generic content does more harm than good.
Thank you to Edward Hones and the team at Hones Law PLLC for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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