How Robert K. Young & Associates cleared their BP backlog

Let's start off this interview. Who am I here with? Gary Young, attorney. So tell me about the firm. What do you guys do? I'm 53 years old. I've been in practice for 27 years. This office was formerly my father's. He's 84, retired. Our office handles basically four general types of cases. Auto, slip and fall, dog bite, construction cases. We've handled probably close to 20,000 of these cases in the past 27 years. We've recovered in excess of $200 million for our clients. We have approximately nine attorneys, 25 administrators. All we do is accident cases.

Before you guys started using the BP Portal, what was the BP situation like? Our office puts every single case into litigation. And in turn, we get answers. And along with the answers, we get demands for discovery, which include demands for bills of particulars. At any given time, we'd have between 100 and 200 demands for bills of particulars that need to be responded to on our office. And in our weekly meetings, I'd see that there were quite a few outstanding. It's my office. I like to push the discovery along. And the sooner we exchange the BP, the sooner we can move on to the next course of the litigation.

So before we had the BP generator, there was, at any given time, 100 to 150 BPs outstanding. We got the BP generator and we trimmed that down to like five. And you know what's funny? We had hired a young lady to help out with the bills of particulars, an administrator to help the attorneys get the BPs done. And her sole job was to pump out the BPs. After we got the BP generator, we had to change her job because there wasn't a backlog of BPs. It really was tremendous.

The BP generator would get the BPs to like the 80% mark, wherein it would be a product that the attorney would have to just review and make sure all the medicals were ticking and tying. And then it would be just about ready to send out. It was a, I would say it was a game changer. It really was a nice product for the office.

Hired her initially to do the BPs. And once we got the BP generator, the BP started getting done much quicker and we didn't need her to do the BPs. So we tasked her with something else.

So was there a trust hurdle? Meaning like, did you have to like accept me into your office and trust me? Yeah. I mean, trust in any profession is a tremendous component of any relationship, whether you're working with a contractor, plumber, electrician, attorney, doctor, it's probably just as important as professionalism. So when you came into the office, we wanted to make sure that, yeah, there was an element of trust that had to be developed, but I also knew you before this relationship. So I knew you'd do the right thing. And then as concerns the product, we also recognize that the BP generator was not infallible and that we have to very carefully review the work product that the, that this machine pumps out or product pumps out. So yeah, we, we, it gives us like a product and then we carefully scrutinize to make sure it's perfect.

So what have you heard from the team when they started using the BP Portal? I've got a lot of good feedback because like a tremendous component of the attorney's job duties on a day to day was to get discovery done. And one of the biggest components of discovery is getting the bills, bill of particulars out and the combined reply. And with the BP generator, we were able to pump out the BP a lot quicker and they could focus on other tasks, basically trimming down their workload. So improved productivity? Yeah, a hundred percent improved productivity.

Who would you recommend this to and why? Sure. I would recommend this to other attorneys that have a practice similar in nature to mine.

Finish this sentence. If your PI firm is still drafting BPs by hand. You're basically, it's, it's a, you're, it's a waste of manpower and you're going to be left behind. It's kind of like when the iPhone came on and I was using a flip phone and I was with the buttons and I was like a little hesitant to embrace the iPhone. And I said to myself, Hey, if I don't jump on this iPhone, I'm going to, technology is going to just gallop away from me. So I would say it's much akin to that.

Who am I with today? My name is Hannah. I work at Robert K. Young and Associates. I'm a legal assistant. I handle generating BPs in the office, bills of particulars. Are you currently doing that right now? At the moment, I am not. I've actually gotten through all the BPs that I had outstanding.

So what was it like to learn writing BPs when you first started? When I first started, the most important thing that they always told me about was medicals, making sure you don't ever miss anything. It's more difficult to add it in later than it is in the beginning. Reading, learning how to read the police report, being able to describe the accident. Those are the main things. Everything else is pretty, majority copy and paste from others. That's for motor vehicle accidents. Slip and falls, I'm not as familiar with, so I won't be able to tell you as much about that. But for the MVA cases, yeah, it's just going over the medicals, the police report, the specifics of the accidents, everything else is copy and paste.

So what is the hardest, time-consuming part about reviewing or making the BP? The most time-consuming part about reviewing the bill of particulars is definitely the medicals, having to go through page by page, especially hospital reports. The generator does that for me in minutes. It links every finding that it has from the records for me, so I can just click on the hyperlink and it'll take me straight to the page it pulled it from, highlight the information that it told me about. With the combined replies, naming all of the different providers and who they are treating, it also saves a ton of time. That's one of the more tedious parts. Yeah, I'd say that's probably the best part about it, in my experience.

What is it like now with the BP Portal versus how it was previously before you had the BP Portal? Now, as opposed to before, before when I had the BP Portal, my steps were go through the answer, go through the medicals, make sure that we have everything that we need to start drafting the BP, and then I would go through all of the MRI findings, any EMG reports, and then it would take me probably around, I'm relatively new at this, so a couple of hours to go through all of the medicals and make sure I didn't miss anything. I was always afraid to miss over some important information. Now, I upload all of the medicals into the generator, and it can spit out answers for me in, I want to say, 5 to 10 minutes. I'm not very good at accident descriptions, sometimes the way the police reports were, it can confuse me. So, having the generator, I do a lot less back and forth now, going back to double-check myself. Really, it kind of streamlined it all into one review process at the end, being able to make any quick edits from the AI draft, and then it probably takes me 30 minutes at most to go over one if I just sit there from start to finish.

How would you say the, would you say the review section of the BP Portal really helps expedite that? Absolutely. Even outside of BPs, when we do general, like, summarizations of the cases for Gary or whoever else, I don't think anyone else does this, but I've been able to put the records in, and then there's the medical review portion outside of the BP generator. So, I can use it for any medical record review, and it's better than other AI alternatives. You know, I would go through ChatGPT or Adobe, the Adobe AI, and they just, it doesn't really understand it in the way that you have trained the BP generator to be able to understand the medical records. Yes, and having it, give me a really nice template is probably the best thing about it. It saves me so much time not having to go back and forth, make sure I have everything included. It, yeah. So, you like the standardization of the template of this, basically the medical summarization? Yes, that's my favorite part about the generator. It's, it was where I struggled the most, always worried to miss something. You know, I don't understand the terminology, but the generator, I don't know what the process is, if it Googles it on its own, but it, you know, it pulls anything important that's necessary.

And you mean everything you say. Yeah, genuinely, this has made my life so much easier. With doing a BP before I used to be able to do one a day, if Jacob walks up to me at like three o'clock, and he tells me he needs two by the end of the day, I can do it for him.

Wow. If I were, if you were to talk to a new legal assistant at another firm, would you tell them to use the BP Portal? Yes, but I wouldn't rely on it entirely. You know, there, there are moments when I'm going through where, of course, there's going to be like little errors. But you work with me very quickly on any issues that do come up. And they're usually fixed by the same day, if not later that week. Thank you. Yeah.