Blake Vanderhyde's current work centers on artificial intelligence in legal practice. It runs along two lines that share one concern.
The first is a public series written for lawyers across the profession. Its aim is clarity. Most lawyers are served neither by the hype around AI nor by blanket caution, and the series gives them a practical way to reason about what the technology can do, where it fails, and how to use it within the duties the profession already carries.
The second is A4A, a company applying AI to a problem Blake spent more than twenty years working inside. Too many victims of mass injury never reach the right firm, because effective outreach is expensive, complex, and hard to coordinate across the many channels through which people now seek legal help. A4A is built to close that gap.
The two lines connect through what Blake learned during five years of antimicrobial resistance consulting. There he used artificial intelligence to do real professional work: regulatory analysis, financial modeling, scientific literature review, and strategic planning across domains outside his training. The technology had crossed a threshold. It had become useful for hard problems, not just impressive in demonstrations. He returned to law in 2025 with that fluency, and with a clearer view of how AI could serve both the profession and the people it is meant to reach.
The AI for Lawyers Series is a fourteen-part series written for practicing lawyers across the profession. Its purpose is to help lawyers think clearly and practically about artificial intelligence, neither chasing the hype around it nor dismissing it out of caution. It is a working primer.
It begins with why so many lawyers are hesitant about AI, and argues that their concerns are largely rational. It then takes up the most commonly cited weakness of the technology, hallucinated legal citations, explaining why hallucinations happen, where that risk is greatest in legal work, and where AI is in fact reliable. From there it moves into a framework for evaluating AI across the major categories of law firm work, the strategic understanding firm leaders need without becoming technical experts, the confidentiality and privilege concerns AI raises, and how to assess the AI vendor landscape.
The later parts turn to application. Where AI can add value to a firm today, how to evaluate AI tools without getting lost in hype, the under-discussed role of marketing as an AI use case, the question of synthetic performers in legal advertising, and the disciplined judgment that separates well-run firms from those that either avoid AI or adopt it carelessly. The series closes by arguing that practicing lawyers cannot leave the AI conversation to vendors, consultants, and technologists alone, because only lawyers carry the profession's ethical duties.
The series is published on Vanderhyde Consulting and on LinkedIn. It does not promote A4A or any other product. It is written to build clarity and trust by helping the profession reason well about the technology.
A specific belief sits at the center of Blake's current work. Artificial intelligence, applied carefully, can compress the cost of effective legal outreach, expand the reach of campaigns, reduce coordination friction across channels, and connect more victims of mass injury to qualified counsel without compromising the ethical obligations of the profession.
That is why Blake partnered with a trusted technical co-founder to launch A4A, Inc., a company building artificial intelligence tools for plaintiff law firms.
A4A's mission is to help law firms communicate more effectively, scale their marketing infrastructure, and connect more victims of mass injury with qualified legal support. The company is structured around a core observation. Most plaintiff firms with the legal capability to serve victims well do not have the marketing capability to reach them. A4A is built to close that gap.
A4A's product architecture is designed around the same ethical premise that drives the public series. Compliance is embedded into the system’s foundation, not added as an afterthought. Transparency and disclosure are native features, not supplementary layers. The platform is built to expand what plaintiff firms can accomplish while preserving and reinforcing the standards they are expected to uphold.
The full picture of A4A's product and market position will be made public in the coming months. The reveal is tied to verifiable outcomes from pilot firms rather than to a calendar date.
The Path That Led Here
The work draws on four distinct bodies of experience.
Traditional Personal Injury Practice
Early in his legal career as a solo attorney, Blake oversaw every stage of client representation, from initial consultation through settlement or trial, while managing the strategic, operational, and financial aspects of the practice.
SEO and Digital Marketing
More than twenty years inside plaintiff legal marketing, building one of the earliest SEO-based marketing networks for plaintiff lawyers in the country, generating cases for firms across many of the most significant mass tort actions of the past two decades. That experience is detailed at Legal Marketing.
Artificial Intelligence and Consulting
Years of practical artificial intelligence use during the antimicrobial resistance consulting work, building real fluency with the tools through sustained application to hard problems. That experience is detailed at Antimicrobial Resistance.
Orientation Towards Justice
A career-long turn toward people who are harmed or overlooked, from undergraduate work with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to the choice to represent injured individuals rather than the institutions that injured them. That throughline is traced at Origins
The combination is uncommon. The current work is the synthesis.
The ongoing AI for Lawyers series is available on Vanderhyde Consulting and on LinkedIn.
For background on the antimicrobial resistance work that introduced Blake to practical artificial intelligence, see Antimicrobial Resistance.
For the underlying legal marketing experience, see Legal Marketing.