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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

> Lawyers bill by the hour. It is not in their interest to speed up what they do, because they only have so many clients.

This isn't how markets work.

If one lawyer starts doing 10x as much work in the same number of hours, then all the customers will move to that lawyer as soon as they find out, and the other lawyers will have to adapt to remain competitive.

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The legal market is competitive, but it is not a normal open market. Model Rule 5.4 is a good example. In a lot of jurisdictions, law firms generally can’t have nonlawyer owners, share legal fees with non-lawyers, or let outside businesses control lawyer judgment, “the fastest lawyer just gets all the customers” is too simple. So if even law, one of the most protected professional labor markets through its own institutional self-protection, voluntarily hollows itself out through AI, that should worry everyone because we would all be screwed. Everyday workers would have no defense against AI aggressive corporations.

Lawyers are extremely well-organized, and not surprisingly, know the law. They always have found ways to limit competition. (Why else would it be such a well-paid job?)

It’s not so well-paying anymore, especially given the onerous education requirements. The exception is for the few who get hired in biglaw firms

I'd expect the market to only work like that for business clients. If I grabbed a person off the street and asked them how they'd evaluate a lawyer's productivity, I suspect they'd generally have no idea.

People are clearly hiring lawyers based on silly billboard ads, after all.

You forgot a crucial step, which is that the lawyer would have to charge less than the competition per person and make up the difference in volume

You don't go to the overworked lawyer if they still charge just as much as their competitors

And for a thought experiment - if a lawyer controls the pace of their work, why work at any reasonable speed? They could take the client's money and go picnic or something then put in 20 minutes at the end of the day.

Something is forcing them to put in long hours. It's the market.

Because they have ethics rules to only bill for hours actually worked. If they did that, they would only get paid for 20 minutes of work.

Huh? Obviously. The example was that they do 20 minutes of work. Of course they bill for 20 minutes.

It'd be a line item: "I worked for 20 minutes. Pay me lots of money". Similar principle to locksmiths when they walk over, do a few seconds of work and charge a hundred bucks. If a lawyer uses the same principle and works for 20 minutes they could target $10k/day.

That isn't a plan that'd work, but if "their interests" were the thing controlling how many hours they worked then that'd be what they would do. They're going to be forced to use AI by the same influences that make them work for full days.

That’s a supply and demand issue. If there were more clients than lawyers, I can totally see a reality where they speed things up because now in one week they can work on 20 cases instead of 2, thus 10x more money, but as you said, it doesn't seem to be the reality of the market.

edit: tldr; it does not seem in their best interests to be more efficient at this point

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