The price for legal work going down might very well create more demand, including for people operating "law machines". Not sure we know where future equilibria lie.
The “easy stuff” for someone’s job, is now the AI stuff for someone else’s job. Where you would hire an intern, the potential client is using Claude instead.
The issue is that this breaks the talent / growth pipeline. You can’t have experts if they don’t go through the process of getting trained and working on incrementally harder problems.
And what happens when the SQL query has some subtle error or is missing data?
With interns, there’s an implicit understanding that you will spend a bit of extra time reviewing their work and mentoring them. With “just AI it bruh,” there is not.
"Price go down means more demand" applied blindly is a an economic theory so absurdly shit that even the most apeshit libertarians like Ayn Rand know it isn't true. Don't make me defend Ayn Rand.
Why would there be less demand for contract law or for privacy related law, for example? There is certainly some elasticity in law related things from my own experience.
Where have I applied elasticity blindly?
Of course it is. When someone is thinking of suing someone else the first thing that gives them pause is the potential legal costs.
You. Cannot. Win. Against. Capital.
And then you're going to sue, and realize that the system is so massively overloaded that the next available judge and jury are in 32 years. Also they're lobbying to replace those with AI judges where they entirely removed the concept of nuance.
Could see the future being AI arguments -> AI judgement -> appeal to human judge/jury
With the appeal to humans being expensive (human lawyers required?) or volume-barred in some manner.