Trial Lawyer’s AI-Powered Voice Tool ‘Brought Me Back to Life’

Lori Cohen built her career on her ability to sway a courtroom. Then she lost her voice.

Cohen, an Atlanta-based partner at Greenberg Traurig, woke one morning in March 2022 to find she could no longer speak. More than two years later, Cohen is still without her voice. Her doctors have yet to identify the cause of the disappearance.

She tried intensive speech therapy, experimental surgeries, acupuncture, and even Russian gravitational weightlifting to restore her voice. Cohen initially “waved off” a speech pathologist’s suggestion to use technology to speak for her—"I could not fathom that I would not be better within a matter of weeks,” she said—and later found text-to-speech tools lacking.

Then she discovered “Lola,” her artificial intelligence alter-ego that’s given Cohen her voice back in court.

“Using Lola to speak professionally—as opposed to the robotic sounding voice on the text-to-speech app—has brought me back to life so to speak and allows me to feel like it is me again presenting to clients, to audiences and in court,” Cohen said.

Technology developed by ElevenLabs created a digitized version of Cohen’s voice drawn from old recordings of her speaking in interviews and in court. The tool is designed to mimic her speech patterns by analyzing units of sounds, called phonemes, and gauging her speaking speed, pitch, and unique aspects like an accent or a drawl. The tool also allows Cohen to express emotion, she says, a critical piece for connecting with jurors in court.

No Robot

Cohen is Greenberg Traurig’s vice chair and co-leads the global firm’s 700-lawyer litigation group.

She has spent more than two decades arguing in high-profile product liability and other trials. Her clients have ranged from health care giants, such as Moderna Inc., Teva Pharmaceuticals, and CR Bard Inc., to retailers and manufacturers, like Walmart Inc., Mattel Inc., and Fisher-Price Inc.

Cohen has earned nearly 60 defense verdicts, according to the firm, and made appearances in roughly 2,000 cases.

In the months after losing her voice, she turned to text-to-speech apps that allow her to type notes that are converted to spoken audio. But the tools made her sound “very robotic,” she said.

Presentation is a key part of the job for litigators, said Rick Levin, who teaches trial advocacy at Northwestern University.

“Trying a case, you’re putting your entire personality out there,” Levin said. “The case is not about the lawyers, it’s about the people you’re representing, but you’re speaking for these people.”

The ElevenLabs tool—Cohen dubbed hers “Lola"—aims to humanize digitally generated voices by analyzing a wide range of elements of speech, said Sam Sklar, a spokesperson for the AI audio research and deployment startup. It’s also designed to be “contextually aware,” he said. Algorithms allow Lola’s expression to change in tone, emotion, or inflection based on the words written, and allows users to manually customize those features.

Cohen and Gerard Buitrago, a longtime friend and trial technologist, spent nearly a year trying to perfect Lola. The tool is web-based, so Cohen continues to use monotone text-to-speech apps for everyday use, like in meetings and to communicate with clients, colleagues, and opposing counsel. This requires her to always travel with two iPhones and two iPads to communicate, which she says makes her “hands and arms hurt from overuse every night.”

Cohen spoke with Bloomberg Law through the use of a text-to-speech app.

By last fall, she had crafted a voice that finally felt authentic. Cohen has been involved in more than twenty cases since that time, including defending Moderna, Inc., with the help of Lola.

To field questions from judges or follow up with witnesses, Cohen has to first type in a response for Lola to then speak.

“Getting to the point where you can easily create speech instantaneously” is a challenge, Sklar said. “One area we continue to invest in is reducing latency—meaning from the time you click ‘generate speech’ to the time audio is coming down—bringing that down as fast as possible.”

Cohen’s experience has added some visibility to how the tech can be used by others in similar situations. ElevenLabs has also worked with Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and corporate sustainability advocate Bill Weihl to reclaim their voices after they were lost to medical conditions.

The startup wasn’t originally tailored for people with disabilities, Sklar said, but it has always aspired to make content more accessible. Its tech can be used to dub videos, create audio books, voice characters, and read text to people experiencing visual impairment, he said.

‘I am Here’

A little more than 1% of lawyers identify as having a disability, a 2023 report from the National Association of Law Placement found. About 12% of first-year law students identified as disabled in a 2022 Law School Admission Council survey, but more than half of those respondents said they tend to not disclose their disabilities.

Angela Winfield, a former commercial lawyer, said she faced more stigma as she increasingly lost her vision due to a medical condition.

Her clients didn’t question her capabilities, said Winfield, now the LSAC’s chief diversity officer and a motivational speaker. But opposing counsel at times would treat her “with kid gloves” and some judges mistook her as party to a case, rather than a lawyer.

“Those things quickly changed once people get to know me, and they saw me there and saw what I was capable of,” said Winfield, who is now legally blind in both eyes. “They had to start to change their perception of someone with a disability.”

Cohen said she’s had similar experiences outside of the courtroom. Some people—"largely strangers,” she said—tend to speak to others in a group rather than addressing her directly when they learn that she lost her voice.

“I try to get in their face and type things like: ‘Hey, I am here, I can hear, I can respond to you,’” Cohen said. “I do not think it is meant to be mean spirited but rather people do not always know what to do or how to relate to someone who can’t speak.”

She takes a similar approach to arguing cases in court. Cohen said she starts her arguments by asking judges and opposing counsel to treat her the same way they would any other lawyer.

“Fire away at me,” she said, “I just may need a little more time to type my responses to the questions or for my rebuttal.”

Then she connects her device to the courtroom speakers and lets Lola take the floor.