Most lawyers hate running a business. Logging hours, invoicing, and bookkeeping aren’t the best use of their time. And while they’re wary of using AI to read and interpret briefs, they’re open to it helping them run a smarter business.
Nate Skinner, CMO of AffiniPay, is building an AI-powered platform that helps attorneys offload the operational burdens of their firm and focus on what they’re actually good at.
In this episode of The Disruption Is Now, Nate joins host Greg Matusky and special guest host Tylor Tourville to unpack why professional services need vertical-specific AI, how AffiniPay’s fintech roots evolved into full-on firm management, and why marketing teams should think less about tools and more about use cases. The conversation is a crash course in what AI can do for professional services.
Watch now:
Key takeaways
Law firms aren’t anti-AI. They’re anti-risk.
Attorneys know AI can save time, especially for tasks like editing or summarizing emails. But they’re wary about using it for core legal work — for good reason.
AI summaries of legal briefs often miss the subtle details that make or break a case. As Nate puts it, lawyers “get paid to read the brief and understand the context.” Automating that process threatens both their value and their accuracy.
Lawyers are open to AI that handles the business side — AR, AP, billing — but they draw the line where legal judgment begins.
AI is transforming firm management behind the scenes
While attorneys may not trust AI to read legal documents, they do trust it to reconcile expenses, track billable hours, and manage payments.
AffiniPay uses AI to automatically allocate charges to client matters, manage trust accounts, and even identify expense patterns. That includes features like Smart Spend, which connects a law firm’s credit card to its case management system, so a receipt for lunch with a client gets filed under the right case — no manual input needed.
AI tool overload is a drag on adoption
With generative AI evolving at breakneck speed, Nate says the real challenge for marketers isn’t adoption, but total paralysis. “There’s so much noise,” he says, that teams don’t know where to start.
His advice is to stop chasing tools and start with use cases. For AffiniPay, that meant automating 50 versions of creative for 50 state bar associations. The results speak for themselves: fewer hours spent, more creative energy for higher-value work, and faster time to market.
Good AI strategy starts with a specific pain point
Nate’s approach is simple: Identify friction, then find an AI tool to eliminate it.
One example was demo creation. Instead of recording screen shares, the AffiniPay team now scripts demos and has AI tools generate them. AI does 90% of the work automatically, with humans polishing the rest.
That’s freed the team to focus on explaining how features actually solve problems, not just how to click buttons.
Key Moments in the Conversation
- Why AffiniPay shifted from payments to full firm management (4:27)
- How attorneys feel about AI reading legal briefs (6:29)
- How LawPay’s AI matches expenses to cases and bills automatically (10:00)
- What AI reveals about payment behavior and client preferences (13:56)
- How to cut through the overwhelming news and information about AI (17:46)
- Using AI to remake 50 state ads instantly (21:03)
- How AI-powered demos have transformed product marketing (25:58)
