This year has brought a wave of significant court decisions, but the team at Frazer Ryan Goldberg & Arnold remains focused on advancing their clients’ interests across a variety of practices. Two of the firm’s senior partners, Lisa Reilly Payton and Brandon Keim, offer unique insights into the challenges of 2024 and the legal industry trends to watch in 2025. Reilly Payton, a respected speaker and expert in estate planning, business law and tax controversy, provides a comprehensive perspective on the legal landscape. Meanwhile, Keim, a former senior trial attorney with the IRS, merges litigation expertise with strategic tax defense. Together, they discuss current trends, the evolving role of AI in law and the future of the legal profession.


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Az Business Leaders talks with Reilly Payton and Keim about what they’ve observed in the legal field this year and what to expect in the sector for 2025 and beyond.

AZ Business Leaders: What trends have you noticed in the legal industry in 2024?

Lisa Reilly Payton: “AI has been, I would say, coming into all different sectors of business. When we are looking at the practice of law overall, we are improving productivity by slowly working in AI and seeing how we adapt to that in the legal profession. We are using it to improve our productivity, save some time and be a bit more efficient for our clients. I think it’s a change that we’re definitely looking into. We’ve already looked into some ways that can basically save some time and increase efficiency with respect to estate planning and estate planning documents. I don’t see that we’ll ever replace us as lawyers (with AI), but it’s just a way we can be more efficient for our clients going forward.”

Brandon Keim: “Specific to tax controversy, we just continue to see more recent government investigations and examinations that increase litigation and a challenging environment for high-net-worth individuals and business owners and addressing the IRS and other taxing authorities. I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. I think we’ll continue to see more work be done and more inquiries to address, given the funding that the government has had. And then I would say, looking at the legal industry as a whole, it has been a challenge finding well-qualified attorneys and staff to meet the demand for our services and I don’t expect that to change either.”

Lisa Reilly Payton

ABL: How has the recent economic climate affected the legal field and are there any upcoming changes to watch?

LRP: “There are some people who are perhaps putting things slightly on hold, waiting for the cost of updating planning to change or waiting until after the election. But there are still a significant number of clients that we are extremely busy with, that are still looking to update their plans and even look into gifting now. I haven’t seen my practice slow down, but we do have such a wide range of clients — from small to extremely high-net-worth — so I think that’s kind of why I haven’t seen a slow down.”

BK: “Since 2020, I think we have seen year-over-year increase in demand for our services. And I think that that’s largely driven by the IRS’ resources and taxing resources increasing. I think there’s certainly potential with the change in administration for a change in the tax world. I’d say the biggest thing that we all have our eyes on is what will happen with the 2017 Tax Reform Act. Many of the provisions are set to sunset in 2025. No matter what happens with the administration, I think it will be interesting to see how Congress deals with that and whether or not some of them are extended or whether some of them sunset. I think that will have a huge impact on everyone.”

ABL: Are there any new tools or strategies that you have seen used for optimizing your work?

LRP: “If nothing changes, meaning if Congress doesn’t take any action, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will expire Jan. 1, 2026. The estate tax exemption will go down to $5 million per person, indexed for inflation. So, what we’ve been doing is using our estate planning tools to help clients utilize their estate tax exemption if they have taxable estates prior to that sunset in 2026. And that also goes hand in hand with a lot of business owners as well, looking at what’s the size of their estate and they should be mindful of utilizing that exemption before it decreases. We’ve been very busy with this already and I think that will continue into 2025 as well.”

Brandon Keim

BK: “I would say that we’re always looking to harness technology, right? All of the new tools that can streamline how we interact with our clients, look at data and ready it for presentation. I think we’ll just continue to do that, to use more tech where we can so that it requires less of us. Certainly, new AI tools in the legal research field have been helpful.”

ABL: What challenges do law firms face as you prepare for the future, in terms technology?

LRP: “As far as AI, I think one of the things that we need to be concerned about is just navigating it. We have to really navigate those challenges because AI does offer significant benefits, but it also raises some ethical and privacy concerns. We have to really make sure we have strong data protection and protect our client confidentiality. We have looked at different tools and we haven’t utilized these for clients yet. But before we would, it would be something that we would address with our clients and make sure that we are practicing the safest methods of integrating it. So, I think in our business especially, there’s nothing more important than client confidentiality. So, it’s a little bit different than other workplace sectors.”

BK: “I think with technology, we’re just always mindful of our data and keeping it secure. What more we can do to protect our clients’ information and how we can prevent any sort of attack. We do that through increased education and better tools. Our IT providers are always suggesting new techniques that we can utilize to secure information and we’re doing that.”

ABL: In what ways have you seen AI used in the field of law? 

LRP: “The steps we’ve been looking into have been basically increasing our efficiency in producing estate planning documents. Of course, they would always be tailored to the client, but using AI can help us come up with templates and different forms that may increase our efficiency and reduce client cost.”

BK: “It’s become part of our legal research tools and it’s built in in our pre-existing legal databases, so what it’s pulling is our real cases. It’s not just making something up. There have been news articles on lawyers maybe using Chat GPT to write briefs, but then the data that Chat GPT pulls from isn’t reality in terms of the legal framework that’s out there. But our service providers are building AI tools that do use the databases that we already search, like Westlaw. So it’s useful in that regard. It’s also useful in mining data that we have in the discovery process and then summarizing data that we have. So, aside from legal research, it’s useful for searching and summarizing the large volume of data that we have.”