Almost thirty years of putting people back together
Roberto Clemente has spent his whole career in busy plaintiff personal injury practices — work that exists to put a person back in the position they would have been in had a serious, often life-changing accident never happened to them. As managing partner of CNF in Adelaide, he knows the job intimately: the long meetings taking detailed instructions, the settlement conferences, the mediations, the court hearings.
It is also, by his own description, deeply labour-intensive. Doing justice to one client means discovery across multiple medical records and reports, detailed statements of personal background, education and employment history, health history, and social and recreational life. He has lived that for almost thirty years — and what he wanted, after all that time, was a way to stop letting the back-end work swallow the part of the job he actually came to law to do.
I've always been in very busy personal injury practices over the years and it's very, I would describe it, labour intensive.
Roberto Clemente
The weeds
The villain was never a person — it was the way the work piled up. Behind every two-hour client meeting came a statement, an introductory letter of advice, terms of engagement, correspondence to the other side, an injury claim form, and more. Then the back end of all of it: the file notes, the emails, the case summaries. Roberto and his colleagues answered it the only way they knew how, with very long hours.
He felt the cost of it personally. His diary was getting clogged with client meetings he could not escape, and too much of his day was administrative rather than the sophisticated legal work that drew him in. He had watched the profession admire colleagues who got to their desks at 4am — and he had quietly decided that, three decades in, that was not his idea of success.
Professionals don't want to be stuck in the weeds doing mundane things. They want to do the exciting part of their job.
Roberto Clemente
A trailblazer, with reservations
The first nudge came from outside the law — someone in another field showed him free AI tools for recording meetings and turning them into task lists. He got excited, brought consultants in to scope the firm's next software, and through that process became aware of Quillio. So he reached out.
A lawyer of 29 years does not adopt new technology blindly. His first questions were the cautious ones: cost, and confidentiality. Seeing a personal injury lawyer, he says, is like going to a doctor — clients open up about every aspect of their life, and that sensitive information has to stay within the firm. He worried, too, that something doing amazing things might prove so costly it never improved the bottom line. Quillio met him there, on his terms, as the assistant he could supervise rather than a magic button — and that was the shift.
How much does it cost here? It looks like it does some amazing things, but maybe it's going to be really costly.
Roberto Clemente
How CNF works now
The first thing that made Roberto a believer was the wash-up of a client meeting. With the client's consent he records the conversation, uploads it, and gives it context — combining it, say, with a medical report from Dr Smith that recommended further investigations. From that he gets a detailed file note and the full set of follow-up correspondence in ten to twenty minutes, where it once consumed a large part of his day.
The firm has pushed it further. Where a mid-level lawyer would once spend half a day sifting hospital records, GP notes and a stack of medical reports to build a treatment chronology, those documents now go into the platform and the chronology comes back in minutes. Roberto checks the work — he insists lawyers always must — but the background of a formulated claim is done fast and reliably, letting juniors move straight to the part that matters: the assessment of past and future loss of earning capacity. All four teams at CNF now use the platform, and Roberto is no longer even its heaviest user.
You'll upload that recording and combine it with the document that you were talking about. And then from there you'd have a detailed file note, detailed correspondence and so forth. And that's all done within 10 to 20 minutes.
Roberto Clemente
The best-ever year
The payoff shows up across the firm. The wash-up of a meeting now takes roughly a quarter of the time, and Roberto estimates the work overall is at least a third quicker — straight through to the bottom line. He is more engaged in meetings, because he knows the back end is being looked after. And cases are reaching their conclusion sooner: a slip-and-fall for a woman in her late eighties, the kind of smaller matter that might once have waited nine to twelve months, was turned around in four.
Speaking on the ninth of July, at the close of the financial year, Roberto put it plainly: CNF had just come off one of its most successful years, if not its most successful ever — and he attributes a significant part of that to the speed the firm has gained. For him it was never only about money. It is about client engagement, client satisfaction, and whether you still enjoy what you do day to day after this long in the job.
We've come off the end of what was one of our most successful financial years, if not our most successful financial year. And I attribute a significant portion of that to the speed at which we're able to now do the work.
Roberto Clemente
His advice to lawyers who have been at it a while
Roberto is clear that the tool is not a button you press to make the work disappear. AI, he says, will only ever be as good as what you put into it — you still supervise it as you would a legal secretary or a junior lawyer, and you still put the detailed, thorough effort in. With Quillio's AI Compass helping him sharpen his prompts, he has leaned further into becoming, in his words, an AI legal engineer.
For peers weighing it up, especially those decades into practice, his message is one of hard work rewarded: you still have to put the work in, but the fruits of your labour will be much greater than what you are seeing now. After 29 years, that is what got him out of the weeds and back to the negotiations, the mediations and the court hearings — the reason he went to law school in the first place.
AI will only be as good as what you put into it yourself.
Roberto Clemente