Bentonville attorney Nick Coleman thought there had to be an easier way to handle Social Security Disability Insurance claims for his clients.
But when he couldn’t locate a technology that would comb through thousands of pages of a client’s medical records, he set out to build his own software.
“I’m very passionate about technology and how you can leverage technology to become a better advocate for your clients,” said Coleman, who graduated from the University of Arkansas School of Law in 2011.
In late 2022, Coleman launched LexMed, a legal tech software company that offers artificial intelligence programs to help attorneys who handle Social Security disability cases.
LexMed’s first product will transcribe audio recordings from the Social Security Administration’s disability claims hearings into a transcript that he touts as an accurate transcription of complex legal, medical and occupational jargon — unlike transcription software that’s currently available. Another selling point is that the transcription also will identify each speaker.
The transcription service is being tested by a few law firms in northwest Arkansas before it becomes available to other attorneys.
Coleman said he wants to make sure the product works as it is described.
“If we release a half-baked product that … has a lot of bugs, has a lot of errors, any attorney that uses it, they’re going to write you off,” he said, “and you’ll lose your credibility with them.”
Coleman said the idea for the company developed while he was handling more than 300 cases annually in his Social Security disability practice and helping his mother, Kathleen Geeslin, navigate the bureaucratic agency to receive monthly payments, which are made to people who have a disability that stops or limits their ability to work.
Geeslin, who died on June 24, had a rare degenerative muscle disease and was able to obtain disability insurance benefits “because she had the resources that a lot of people don’t,” Coleman said. Coleman’s father is a trial attorney.
But other Arkansans with disabling conditions don’t have the same resources, he said. “I really thought there was a way to level the playing field,” Coleman said.
Coleman said he thought technology could help, but there wasn’t anything available at the time that could handle what he wanted to accomplish.
“When OpenAI went public with their GPT model in late ’22, it kind of changed the game as far as what we could do with medical record analysis,” he said.
The GPT model helped “because it’s great at categorizing information and then being able to link it to another legal regulation in this use case.”
Coleman hired Phillip Cannon, a software engineer in Fayetteville, to build the software.
While LexMed is pursuing its medical record analysis product, Coleman said he wanted to bring something of value to Social Security disability attorneys quickly, so he decided to first launch the automatic speech recognition transcription service.
Cannon said one of the biggest challenges was making the automatic speech recognition software specialized for legal, medical and vocational jargon.
Another hurdle was making sure that the software correctly identifies the speakers during the hearings, Cannon said.
For now, Coleman is continuing his legal practice, but he plans to devote all of his time to LexMed when it matures.
“We want to create a platform that provides AI solutions to all kinds of pain points for both Social Security disability attorneys, and then down the road to practices … that are involved with injuries, medical evidence,” Coleman said.
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