AI-Powered Intake for Law Firms with Vaishnav Kuruvanka of Cicero

Most law firms don't have a marketing problem. They have a front door problem.

In this episode of the Optimized Law Firm podcast, host Melissa Sanchez sits down with Vaishnav Kuruvanka, co-founder of Cicero, a company that runs AI-powered front offices for law firms in eight states.

Cicero started with a personal frustration: Vaishnav and his brother called 30 to 40 law firms trying to hire one for their family, and almost nobody called them back. That experience turned into a company built on a simple idea. The best use of AI in intake isn't replacing your staff, it's making them better in real time.

What's in This Episode?

• The story of calling 40 Houston law firms with a paying case and getting nowhere
• Why intake should be treated as sales, not administration
• Why Cicero shifted from AI voice agents to "human in the loop" tools
• How real-time coaching puts a veteran intake specialist's instincts on every staff member's screen
• The biggest objection firms have to AI, and how Cicero answers it
• Why law firm owners should rebuild their processes from first principles

Three Key Takeaways

Intake is a sales function, not an administrative one. Most firms are quietly losing revenue at the front door long before marketing gets blamed for a lack of growth.

The highest-leverage use of AI in a law firm isn't replacing staff, it's augmenting them in real time. Cicero's "human in the loop" model prompts intake staff with the best thing to say while they're still on the call, rather than pulling humans out of the conversation.

Rebuild processes from first principles, not habit. Ask whether each step in your operations still makes sense today. Tools that didn't exist five years ago now make entirely new workflows possible.

Episode Chapters

1. Meet Vaishnav Kuruvanka and Cicero — 00:00
2. The 40 Law Firms That Never Called Back — 02:25
3. Inside a Cicero Call: Real-Time AI Coaching for Intake Staff — 06:58
4. Resistance, Trust, and the Human Touch — 13:30
5. Rebuilding Law Firm Operations from First Principles — 15:42

Full Episode Transcript

Melissa:

Welcome to the Optimized Law Firm podcast, where we talk about how to run a more profitable and enjoyable law firm. I'm your host for today, Melissa Sanchez. I'm the marketing director at Constellation Marketing. I am joined here today with Vaishnav. He's the co-founder of Cicero, a company leading the conversation on the use of technology and the use of AI to really, really improve the management of a law firm. Welcome, Vaishnav.

Vaishnav:

Thank you so much, Melissa. It's really an honor to be here. My name is Vaishnav and I'm one of the co-founders of Cicero. Cicero runs AI-powered front offices in eight states across the country today, and we're backed by leading technologists, from xAI to the co-owner of the Portland Trail Blazers, and a handful of practicing lawyers. Today, we have the mission of delighting the customers of law firms through the way that they operate. And we offer a broad range of products, ranging from ways to really empower staff with AI all the way to autonomous AI systems.

Melissa:

Thank you. Now tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you start this business? How did you get into it?

Vaishnav:

I went through college during Covid, and so I was spending my junior and the beginning of senior year at home, and everything was driven by technology. And I started to think that technology was going to have such an immense impact on the future of humanity, the way that people were going to live, the way that people were going to work, what it meant for the digital economy and the physical economy.

And so I started to shift a lot of my focus and interest into technology. I actually started my career focusing more on real estate. How can we make real estate underwriting and real estate investment more accessible, and also just more efficient? And I started to work a lot on how we can design products that are very consumer friendly, products that are meant for really revitalizing these legacy industries.

Melissa:

You mentioned legacy industries like real estate. Now I'm curious, what was the moment that you realized law firm intake was broken enough to build a company around it?

Vaishnav:

Yeah, I think it's a wonderful question. And like a lot of companies, this was actually founded out of a personal problem that my family was having. My older brother is now a law school graduate, but at the time he was in law school, and we had a small piece of land out in Texas that was undergoing somewhat of a legal problem. So my father came to my brother and me, and he looks at my brother and he goes, "Hey, you're a lawyer, right? Can you help me sue this guy, or can you help me with this problem?" And my brother goes, "I'm not a bar-admitted attorney, so it's illegal for me to do this. But I'll do the second best thing." So my brother and I decided to help my dad by calling a bunch of lawyers and trying to get a hold of someone who was going to be able to help.

And so, Melissa, it may be hard to believe, but we called about 30 to 40 different law firms around the Houston area, essentially giving them our problem and our business, saying, "Hey, please take this case on. We're willing to pay you. We'd love to work with you." And it was so difficult to get a hold of someone. Half the time they didn't pick up. The other half of the time, someone would take down our basic information and say someone's going to reach out to you, and a week would go by, two weeks would go by, and we would never hear from them. And it was just really puzzling to us. It's like, I'm essentially trying to hand you some cash. I'm coming to you, I'm finding you, and you're not taking my money, and you're not moving forward with my case. And so we thought, if we're going through this problem, I wonder if this is the case with other people across the country.

That's really when we started looking into the problem and realized that intake can be improved. I don't know if I'd say intake is broken, but I'd say there are ways for the intake process to really become an economic engine for law firms. And right now it's kind of in that neutral area where it's doing some good and also doing some bad.

My vision for Cicero two years from now is that our clients operate their firms in a way that their customers have no choice other than to be delighted through and through. And that journey really started with the front office for us, because that's where the client journey begins. We definitely see this with a lot of the law firms that we work with, and we'll say it again and again: if intake is broken, marketing doesn't work. And a lot of law firm owners actually do not realize how broken their intake is.

Our initial journey as a company really started with voice agents. We started to realize there was a really big problem when someone would call the law firm after hours, or the staff was busy and someone called in. Sometimes those leads would get dropped. There's no one to really talk to them, they go to voicemail, and they end up just calling the next firm. And so we started to think, how can we really solve this problem? By hooking up an AI with a voice and having it start answering phone calls.

And interestingly enough, Melissa, we learned that it's actually a lot more powerful to put AI in the tools of humans, as opposed to trying to replace humans with AI.

Melissa:

I couldn't agree more.

Vaishnav:

We really shifted our focus from these AI intake agents, which we still offer as a service, mainly for overflow and after hours, to these human in the loop products. I'd be happy to go into a little more detail around exactly what they do. But the idea, Melissa, is that every law firm that we know has an intake staff, and some of them are very experienced, some of them are new and getting used to the job. So our whole focus at Cicero is: how can we create AI-powered front offices for law firms across the country, so that their intake staff are operating like rock stars all the time, 24/7?

Melissa:

Walk us through what actually happens on a call when Cicero is involved, versus how it used to be before.

Vaishnav:

A lot of law firms either have in-house staff for intake, where they have a dedicated team of folks who are picking up phones, talking to people, trying to build a connection, and also essentially selling the firm as well. I wrote a blog post saying that intake is essentially sales, and I think that's really important. So we like to call them internal sales teams, or intake staff. We also saw that there was a large group of folks we were talking to that had offshore teams, whether that's in different countries, or just AI receptionists that would pick up the phone, take down a brief message, and say someone was going to call you back.

And so we really felt like there was an opportunity here to put technology in the hands of these wonderful folks who are playing such an important role in how the law firm operates. And like I mentioned, Melissa, we really believe that intake can become this economic engine for the law firm, where you can go from the phones ringing to actual direct revenue for the firm.

Before Cicero came into the picture, folks would pick up the phone and try to jot down some notes, and that's if they were even able to pick up the phone. Then they would send a note to the attorneys or legal staff, or maybe they would transfer the caller to someone. What we found is that it's actually very difficult to talk to someone and fill out a document at the same time, to write some notes down and fill out a questionnaire while you're in the conversation. It's almost like if I was trying to have this conversation with you, Melissa, and I was trying to type out everything that you were saying. It's very difficult.

So with Cicero, what we're doing with these human in the loop products is engaging as a silent party on each call, so that we can transcribe and pull out all the facts and details in real time, create those summaries, and create the next steps. And a more cutting-edge feature that we recently rolled out actually prompts the intake staff in real time: "Hey Melissa, here's the best thing for you to say when someone says they're having a really tough time, or they were in a car accident, or they're really scared about their immigration status. Here's the best way for you to comfort them. If they're asking you why they should go with your firm, here's the best way to sell the value of the firm."

Every time there's an opportunity to comfort the client, ask a follow-up question, gather important details, or sell the value of the firm, in under one second it's putting the perfect, highest-impact thing for the intake staff to say directly on their screen. The idea is that whenever you have someone on the phone, the last thing you want to do is let them get off without either signing them as a client or getting all the information your team needs to take action. So what Cicero Coach does is put all the intuition and experience of a veteran intake specialist on the screen in real time for intake staff, so that you can make the most out of every opportunity and every call that comes in.

Melissa:

I'm sure that's been very beneficial for the law firms that are already using it. I know this is a very new product. Are you already applying it to the core product itself, or not yet?

Vaishnav:

A lot of our existing clients are using the product, and they're seeing that it's really helpful for a handful of things. Number one, it really helps new intake staff and new additions to the team ramp up and start performing very close to the highest performers on the team right away. And we're very excited about driving more usage of the product, because with every call we're tracking what suggestions are getting accepted and what suggestions are not, what the flow of these conversations is, and what types of calls are converting and not. We're using that data to make the platform a lot better as well.

Melissa:

We see a lot of AI coming up these days. AI is everything. But a lot of the missing part with AI is not having a human in the loop, especially in an industry like law, where people are already struggling and they need a real human to speak to.

Vaishnav:

I think there's a lot of talk nowadays about AI replacing people, AI taking jobs, a future where AI does everything and people don't need to work. That's very difficult for me to believe. I really think that humans have so much judgment, so much intelligence, and so much emotional intelligence, and that makes them extremely powerful when they're using the right tools. I think that's really the future of the legal industry. What started as us taking a very technology-forward approach of "how can we automate intake" has really turned into "how can we leverage human intelligence using AI, and how can we make this very personal and human experience of going to a law firm and getting legal help into a delightful experience?"

A lot of our clients, before they started working with us, had their staff filling out questionnaires. They had to go into their CRM or case management tool and type in all the fields and all the information, and that was creating a very strong backlog of, "Here are all the people that called in, here are all the documents I need to generate, here are all the profiles I need to update." It was really a drag on how quickly the firm could move. With Cicero taking over the responsibility of transcribing the call, extracting all the facts and details, and automating document generation and case profile creation, we're seeing that firms are actually eager to take on more calls. And like I said, there's about a 90% reduction in their follow-up time, which is really amazing in a field where follow-up and speed really matter.

Melissa:

Absolutely. Thank you for sharing so much about Cicero. I think your approach is very interesting, really empowering this human sensitivity that you can only have through conversation with another human, combined with the knowledge. It's fascinating. So that leads into my next question. What's the biggest resistance you've heard from firms you start working with, and how has Cicero addressed that resistance?

Vaishnav:

I think the main resistance, Melissa, has been around losing the human connection and human touch. That was a really big part of why we shifted the strategy from having AI on the front lines to keeping intake staff on the front lines, but powering them with AI. Lawyers operate on trust. You were mentioning this before we started recording: your parents are lawyers, my brother's a lawyer, and you were saying Patrick's family has some lawyers in it as well. Whenever a customer is pushing back on using AI, I really see that as an opportunity for us to improve the product, because we're not making the value apparent enough. But I still come back to this: if you can see even a 1% efficiency gain from a technology, compounded over time, it can make a really big impact.

Melissa:

What surprised you the most about building a tech-forward product in the legal market?

Vaishnav:

I think there's not enough attention being put on the actual administration of law firms. When we started speaking with our early customers, we found that they were having a big problem with administering and running the law firm. They spend so much time getting a JD, building all this experience, and representing their clients. But the problems that are really holding their firms back are more around operations and logistics. So what we learned early on, Melissa, was that our journey starts with the front office, but the broader vision for the platform is: how can we create a system for folks to run their law firms like a machine, in the sense that it's reliable, it's predictable, and it can really be a driver of progress for their clients and for their actual legal work.

Melissa:

I'm very excited to see how Cicero grows in the next two years and the next five years. So, final question. What do you wish more law firm owners understood about managing their business with technology in hand?

Vaishnav:

It's really easy for me as an outsider to come into one of our clients' firms and see processes that are being run just because they were done like that last year, and five years and ten years ago. I would implore all law firm owners to really think about how they can construct their processes and operations from first principles. Does it actually make sense to do it this way? Is there a better way to do it? Is there a step here that we can cut out? Are we allocating our team resources to the right things? Are we spending our marketing dollars in a way that's creating high-quality, sustainable leads? There's a broad range of questions that need to be asked, and they create an opportunity for these systems to be rebuilt from scratch. And I think now is a really opportune time, because things that were seemingly impossible to do five years ago are now possible with the technology we have in our hands, on our phones, and on our computers.

Melissa:

Approaching their management with curiosity. So tell me, where can people find you? How can they reach Cicero?

Vaishnav:

Our website is ciceroailaw.com. We're on LinkedIn, we're on X, and you can reach us at any time at founders@ciceroailaw.com.

Melissa:

Thank you, and thank you again for your time and your perspective. I think this has been a very productive conversation, and probably very inspiring for a lot of lawyers listening.

Vaishnav:

Thank you so much for the opportunity, Melissa.