(From left) Phil Cannon and Nick Coleman (Victoria Dickerson with Startup Junkie)

Bentonville attorney Nick Coleman felt there had to be an easier way to process his clients’ Social Security disability benefits claims.

However, when he couldn’t find technology that would allow him to sift through thousands of pages of a patient’s medical records, he set out to develop his own software.

“Technology is my passion, and I’m very interested in how to use it to become a better advocate for your clients’ interests,” says Coleman, who graduated from the University of Arkansas School of Law in 2011.

In late 2022, Coleman founded LexMed, a legal tech software company that offers artificial intelligence programs to assist lawyers handling Social Security disability cases.

LexMed’s first product will convert audio recordings of Social Security disability hearings into a transcript that it touts as an accurate transcription of complex legal, medical and professional terms – unlike transcription software currently available. Another selling point is that the transcription also identifies each speaker.

The transcription service will be tested by some law firms in Northwest Arkansas before being made available to other attorneys.

Coleman said he wanted to make sure the product worked as described.

“If we release an immature product that has a lot of bugs and errors, any lawyer who uses it will write you off,” he said, “and you will lose your credibility with them.”

Coleman said the idea for the company came about while he was handling more than 300 cases a year in his Social Security disability benefits practice and was helping his mother, Kathleen Geeslin, navigate the bureaucratic process of receiving monthly payments made to people who are unable to work or have limited ability to work because of a disability.

Geeslin, who died June 24, suffered from a rare degenerative muscle disease and was able to receive disability benefits “because she had the resources that many people don’t,” said Coleman. Coleman’s father is a trial lawyer.

But other people with disabilities in Arkansas 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 believed technology could help, but at the time there was nothing that could accomplish what he wanted to accomplish.

“When OpenAI made its GPT model public in late 2022, it changed the game in terms of medical record analysis,” he said.

The GPT model helped with this “because it is excellently suited to categorizing information and then being able to link it to another legal regulation in this use case.”

Coleman hired Phillip Cannon, a software developer from Fayetteville, to develop the software.

While LexMed works on its medical records analysis product, Coleman wanted to quickly provide something of value to Social Security attorneys, so he decided to launch the automatic speech recognition transcription service first.

According to Cannon, one of the biggest challenges was specializing the automatic speech recognition software in legal, medical and professional jargon.

Another hurdle is ensuring that the software correctly identifies speakers during hearings, Cannon said.

Coleman currently continues his legal practice, but plans to devote his full time to LexMed once the company matures.

“We want to create a platform that provides AI solutions to all kinds of problem areas, both for Social Security attorneys and for practices dealing with injuries and medical evidence,” Coleman said.