Episode 029 AI and the Rise of the Superpowered Solo

Every lawyer who's ever complained that no software vendor understands their practice has secretly wondered the same thing Tara Salinas actually did something about: what if you just built it yourself? Tara, a consumer bankruptcy lawyer in Denver, didn't buy a client intake system — she built one, on a stack most lawyers have never heard of, and she's convinced you could too. If you've never touched code, does "build it yourself" actually mean anything for your practice — or is it Jetsons talk that only works for people who were already halfway there?

In this episode:

- How Tara went from a folder of sideways phone photos labeled "scan001" to a Claude-built client portal that auto-identifies, renames, and sorts every document a client uploads
- The nuts and bolts of that portal: a Supabase database on a Vercel/Next.js front end, running an API that scores its own confidence and routes anything uncertain to a "needs a human eye" folder
- Why Tara moved from ChatGPT to Claude in February 2026 and started building with Claude Code, Projects, and custom skills
- ABA Formal Opinion 512 and the argument over what actually counts as a "self-learning" AI tool requiring client disclosure and consent
- Individual vs. team AI subscriptions — why sharing one login with staff likely isn't enough to meet the compliance bar, regardless of platform
- The difference between a "skill" and an "agent" — Ron's Family Guy arms analogy, and where agentic activity starts creating real risk
- Why AI chatbots are steering financially distressed consumers toward debt settlement instead of bankruptcy, and what that means for the profession
- NACBA's incoming AI Advantage program: a prompt library, a skill library, and a microlearning track for training the next generation of bankruptcy lawyers
- Tara's client AI policy — the privilege risk of running case documents through a third-party AI tool, and why she bills clients who hand her "AI slop"
- The Users and Builders framework: what a user does with a business problem versus what a builder does with the same one

We also discuss:

- Tara's path from a near-miss patent law career and an unfinished electrical engineering degree into bankruptcy law
- The bankruptcy bar's demographic gap after 15 quiet years under BAPCPA, and why the profession needs more young lawyers now
- Practice Signals: a burned-out seventh-year associate on Reddit weighing solo practice against leaving law to sell AI software
- How a bankruptcy lawyer can go solo with volunteer cases, trade groups, and a notoriously collegial bar
- Screenshot hoarding and how to actually manage the AI tool tips piling up on your desktop
- AI as "durable infrastructure" — Ron's comparison to the internet and the electrical grid

Key Takeaway

Tara Salinas didn't set out to become a software developer. She set out to stop losing hours to a folder of unnamed scans, and one afternoon with ChatGPT turned into a purpose-built client portal running its own confidence-scored document API. The lesson isn't that every lawyer needs to learn Supabase and Next.js — it's that the line between "using a tool" and "building one" is a lot thinner than most lawyers assume, and crossing it starts with one file, not a development budget.

This lands differently depending on where a lawyer sits. Flintstones lawyers need permission just to try the one file Tara keeps preaching. Simpsons lawyers are the ones actually deciding whether to stay users forever or start building small — a bank statement analyzer, a skill, a prompt library entry. Jetsons lawyers like Tara are already past that question, and the show's real pivot this season is that Users and Builders, not Flintstones and Jetsons, is becoming the more useful way to sort the room.

Mentioned in This Episode

- Tara Salinas, consumer bankruptcy lawyer, Denver, Colorado
- NACBA — Me, Myself, and AI webinar; incoming AI Advantage program
- ChatGPT
- Claude, Claude Code, Claude Projects and skills
- ABA Formal Opinion 512 (2024)
- Supabase, Vercel, Next.js
- Glade.ai
- Yvonne Nath and last week's episode on Counsel Commons and skills vs. agents
- Jen Grondahl Lee, Lawyers Success Network
- Complete Bankruptcy/Team Accelerator (Ron's referenced training program)
- Family Guy (referenced for the skills-vs-agents analogy)
- ECF and Infusionsoft (referenced in Ron's email-automation story)
- DocuSign

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