More MD law firms adopt AI as the technology evolves

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Maryland law firms are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence tools to help streamline their practices, attorneys say.

This echoes the results of an American Bar Association survey that found AI usage by law firms nationwide nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, rising from 11% to 30% of firms polled. The 2024 survey results were published in 2025.

“Although AI has been around, it has exploded in the last year,” said Mary Roby Sanders, a partner at Turnbull, Nicholson & Sanders in Towson.

Help with discovery

The firm uses artificial intelligence primarily to help with discovery issues, Sanders said.

“We can scan in all kinds of bank records and credit card statements, and it will analyze those and give us a report,” Sanders said, explaining, for example, that she could direct the AI to identify all charges made at restaurants or hotels.

AI is also useful in determining whether records have been altered, Sanders said.

“Let’s say you use QuickBooks to do your accounting,” she said. “I can analyze and see if anything’s been changed or updated or if it’s not copasetic. A lot of people go back and retrofit their accounting records.”

Said Sanders: “It takes an enormous amount of time to (manually) sort through these records and find the needle in the haystack, while AI can find it right away.”

Faith Khan, an associate at Turnbull, Nicholson & Sanders, said AI was also helpful in preparing issue summaries.

“If we’ve had cases that are coming from other firms that have already had extensive litigation or discovery, we can put in the discovery that’s been produced in the past for an issue summary,” she said. “It helps familiarize us with the case a lot quicker.”

Khan emphasized that the AI program provides links for all information presented.

“The good thing about the program we use is it will bookmark every document that it pulls information from so we can verify that the information is accurate,” she said.

AI is also helpful in preparing opening statements, Khan said.

“We feed in our discovery and say, ‘What are good questions to ask a witness?’ or we’ll give (it) a summary of what the issues in the case are with a few facts and then it’ll draft an opening statement,” she said. “It gives us a good head start on things.”

Savvier lawyers, new technologies

Matthew Kohel, a partner at Saul Ewing in Baltimore, said lawyers are becoming savvier about using AI in their work.

“I think generally speaking people are more aware of issues like hallucinations now than they were a year ago,” said Kohel, who chaired the MSBA task force that developed an advisory document on generative AI last year.

Generative AI programs such as ChatGPT are known to hallucinate, or produce convincing but false information, such as citations to nonexistent legal cases.

Kohel noted that new AI technologies continue to appear.

“Technology is evolving as people are adopting it, and so it’s also becoming more complicated in certain senses,” he said.

Law firms increasingly use various generative AI programs – also called LLMs, or large language models – to complete different tasks, he said: “You might like how this LLM writes, while (another) one has better graphics or better research.”

More change is coming, Kohel said.

“In terms of what’s on the horizon, I think it’s just a continued evolution of the technology and just continued adoption of it,” he said, citing AI’s helpfulness in IP searches, contract drafting and analyzing pleadings, among other legal tasks.

Importance of training

Jason Balog, a principal at Miles & Stockbridge in Baltimore and a member of the firm’s Corporate and Securities practice group, pointed to the increasing pace of AI improvements.

“There have been large language models that have been used for legal work for the better part of a decade … and those technologies went from bad to good and then really good, but it took a decade,” Balog said.

Now, he said, advances come rapidly: “The speed at which they improve is really for me kind of the shocking part.”

Balog emphasized the importance of knowing how to use AI in legal practice.

“There’s a whole skill set about being able to use the technology and being able to understand how it works, understand what you need to put into it, how you need to prompt it, and how you need to ask it to produce the results you’re looking for,” he said.

Law firms originally took one of two approaches to AI, Balog said: letting people figure it out on their own or creating training programs to help practitioners understand how the technology works and how best to use it.

Miles & Stockbridge went with the second approach, Balog said.

“I think it’s been extremely helpful for us as a firm in our development and use of technology,” he said. “It’s really an important, useful skill.”