- A paid research tool may already be free in your bar dues. Mine was. I almost bought it anyway.
- An AI can do the tedious verification with you — the associate’s hours a solo never had.
- The one check that decides everything stays human. The machine flags; you rule.
I don’t run a law practice. My work is building the AI operating systems that run other people’s — AI-enablement for legal, full stop. So when I put one of these systems through real legal workflows, I’m not lawyering; I’m pressure-testing what the solo on the receiving end will actually experience. This week the test handed me three things I’d give any solo practitioner in a heartbeat — and the first had nothing to do with clever prompting and everything to do with what a solo already owns. Notes sixteen through eighteen.
16. Solos do have a friend in the AI
The system needed to confirm that court decisions were still good law — that nothing later had overruled or undercut them — which takes a citator. Citators are the kind of paid tool a big firm buys site-wide and a solo squints at the price of. So I did the solo thing: I started filling out a “contact sales” form to go buy one. The AI stopped me mid-form. Wrong door. The access was already there — a state bar had folded a citator (Decisis) in as a member benefit, free to every active licensee through the practice portal, and it had simply never been switched on. Not a trial, not a callback. A login already paid for, gathering dust.
That is the discovery I want in front of every solo: check what your bar already gives you before you reach for a credit card. And then the second half, which is the part money can’t shortcut — the AI ran the manual checks alongside, one authority at a time, surfacing each result so a human could read it. The gap between a solo and a large firm was never only the subscriptions; it’s the associate who knows which benefit is buried in the dues, and the hours to actually run the tool once it’s found. An AI-enablement system can be both — the colleague who reads the fine print and the second set of hands on the tedious pass. That is not a small thing when the whole firm is one person.
17. A red flag is a lead, not a verdict
Partway through those checks, a brand-new opinion lit up with the worst thing a citator can say: negative treatment detected. The reflex — the one an unattended script would follow — is to drop the case and move on. But a flag is a place to start reading, not a verdict to obey. Open the actual report and the “negative” items weren’t about the case at all: they were unrelated decisions that merely shared a common surname, parked in a sidebar of related documents. The opinion itself was clean.
For a solo evaluating any of these tools, that’s the pattern worth internalizing: automation is fastest at producing a signal, and slowest at knowing what the signal means. A scraper obeys the badge and quietly kills a perfectly good authority; a practitioner reads two more screens and keeps it. The value was never the automated flag. It was refusing to treat the flag as the answer — which is exactly the kind of judgment a good enablement system is built to route to you, not around you.
18. The check that matters most is the one a machine can’t run
Two things keep that citator pass in human hands, and they point the same way. First, the seat is an individual member benefit — its terms forbid scripting and bulk automation, so the lookups genuinely can’t be mechanized like the deterministic gates. Second, as the false alarm showed, reading a flag correctly takes judgment a script doesn’t have. So the most consequential verification in the whole run is, by design, the one a human drives.
There’s an honest tail I build for openly. Because that check is manual, the automated battery can go green while it’s still unrun — every deterministic gate passes, and the one that needs a person hasn’t happened yet. A green board is not a finished job when a manual gate is outstanding. So the discipline I ship to a solo is boring and load-bearing: a manual gate that lives only in someone’s head is a gate that eventually gets skipped, so it goes on the checklist beside the automated ones, with the same authority to stop a shipment. The system does the labor with you. It does not do the judgment for you — and an honest one is built so it can’t pretend to.
These notes aren’t a practice diary — they’re a record of what I keep finding while building AI systems for legal work, written for the solo and small-firm attorneys those systems are for. This one you can act on without me: go log in to your bar’s practice portal and see what’s already yours.
Field Notes are written for licensed attorneys and are not legal advice. Mike Moss is a Utah-admitted attorney doing AI-enablement work — not operating a law practice.