As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Because you'd rather pay your $1000 to OpenAI for 5 milliseconds of work, instead of to a human lawyer for 10 seconds of work?
Enjoy your cheap lawyer tokens while you can.
If the established system can adapt to the disruption, then as consumers we have more choices.
If the established system dies and the disruptor replaced it (DVD rental vs Netflix), then the disruptor, despite their weaknesses, do answer the consumer needs better.
If both the established and disruptive system dies, then maybe they're not that important in the first place.
They grift about as hard as tech workers did pre-2022. Relying on the fact that no one can easily audit their work to justify their one hour of actually work despite making easily 300K+ a year.
Please kill their golden goose. Most lawyers are actively harmful to society.
This isn’t true at all.
Maybe courts could be replaced by AI too once it's good enough?
With the right to escalate to human judges of course.
and without turning it into current phone helplines or support chatbots, god please.
If the cost of what a lawyer does today drops to pennies, the system probably needs robo-judges, and/or massive penalties for taking something in front of a human judge when the facts sufficiently completely one sided, as making them pay the winning party's legal fees will become insufficient deterrence.
On the civil side, high-dollar disputes are already litigated. The real potential growth enabled by cheaper legal services will be in small claims. Those courts can be scaled up because they don't require a jury or even a real judge.
Burn their entire industry to the ground. I welcome making the practice of law an AI-only field and ban humans from working in it to remove prejudice, misconduct, expense. As a former foster parent, I've seen children being delayed justice for weeks because two lawyers couldn't find time for a 15 minute conversation in front a judge. I've hated all lawyers ever since. Gatekeeping priesthood of the 21st century.
Dante's 8th Circle indeed.
It's a critical law currently working its way through congress. It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution. And that's a trend - when things were done by people and for people, they tended to be brief and clear. As lawyers got involved, everything became a convoluted indecipherable mess which may as well be written in Latin.
I took a look at a few random sections of it and didn't see anything undecipherable, other than maybe things that lack enough context because it is written as a diff from the current law.
The comparison to the length of the Constitution makes little sense to me. The Constitution establishes a framework and some power allocations. It says almost nothing about the bazillion lower level details necessary to actual have a functioning county.
Obviously individual sections of a law are going to literally 'decipherable' in the sense that they are written in English, but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government. Or similarly the Bill of Rights lays out some of the most critical rights and restrictions in the US, yet each is no longer than a few sentences which are easily understood.
OK, but now in addition to understanding the structure of US government from reading the Constitution try to understand those things you ask of the bill: the incentive for passing the Constitution, its implications, and so forth.
At the least you also need to read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist papers, many early debates in Congress over what the heck the Constitution means, many early Supreme Court cases, and probably a fair bit of history to understand the issues the country had under the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution was supposed to address.
Same for the Bill of Rights.
In modern terms things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are prompts. Bills and case law are implementations.
The implementations are complicated because (1) law concerns people and what they do and people and their endeavors are complicated, (2) we have a whole lot of people in a large interconnected and interdependent economy, and (3) a whole lot of people look for any ambiguity they can find and try to exploit it for their own gain, often to great detriment to others, so bills need to be explicit to cover the edge cases.
Similarly when I speak of the motivation for things, I'm not speaking of some subtle and nuanced historical understanding of motivation, but simply what something does and why somebody might want it. If somebody is of average intelligence they can easily infer such from the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and so forth. But in that bill I referenced, you can't even ELI5 the law, let alone why or what it would change. It's an obfuscated mess. And none of this is necessary at all.
The lawyers did not properly review the agreements, causing post-signature discovery of major issues and having to redo and execute all the agreements a second time, leading to inflated lawyer bills.
If the lawyer is going to prompt the same AI that I can prompt myself and is not going to review the agreements thoroughly, then it is clear where this is leading.
Lawyers lobbying to outlaw AI-generated legal documents?
The ridiculous overcharging thing was something I thought the entire public was well versed in, so the idea that someone could earnestly think that they would get a discount seems absurd to me. As I recall, even the Oscars gift bags given to nominees in one of the years contained a prenup template supposedly crafted by best-in-business (divorce?) lawyers where you just needed to fill in the blanks. If you weren't getting a discount before AI, you are not getting a discount with AI I would presume.
It is understandable to see the moat as the illiteracy of the public regarding the legal system because the concerted effort to keep that illiteracy in place is a disgrace. But when the stakes are high, the moat still is finding a lawyer who knows their shit and one you can hold accountable. Which is why I find the idea of lawyers being dependent on AI much more terrifying.
Because a lawyer selling a contract template, is in many ways, very similar in concept to tech industry selling a software license/seat.
They are both akin to “templates”, and selling IP.
Not in principle, but in practice.
So, if a lawyer bills $1000 for "10 seconds of work", it smells fraudulent.
If $1000 was a flat rate, then it's similar to software: you're purchasing some IP and passing off legal liability to the lawyer. How long the lawyer spent on it doesn't matter.
The fee agreement was an hourly rate for producing a legal document. The resulting document looks like it took 10 seconds to produce. The lawyer billed $1000 worth of hours.
So, either the document was much more complex than anticipated (in which case the lawyer should have said so), or the lawyer inflated the hours.
In reality they'll spend 1 minute grabbing a close-enough template, 10 seconds filling it in, 3 minutes billing you, and 55 minutes double-dipping by doing work for other clients.
We don’t know that for certain.
One can argue that there should be, but billing in 10 second increments might also be a bit much to ask.
One would hope that they would at least aggregate multiple smaller-than-resolution time blocks into one before billing though. (Five documents over the course of a week ends up costing the same)
It’s hilarious to see people complaining about lawyers being overpaid and incompetent on a forum dedicated to an industry that was completely unregulated up until about a month ago. A lawyer can be disbarred from his profession for making these kinds of mistakes; can you?
The people and their experience is still very valuable, but having been in the business since early 2000s the job shouldn’t be called ‘software developer’ anymore. Even ‘software engineer’ is somewhat inadequate given what the end product is vs what is actually being engineered by humans. ‘Software factory process automation engineer’ maybe counts?
Ahh, the salaryman lament against contract workers (plumbers, car mechanics, lawyers etc): he makes $25/hour, why don't they charge similar or less?
Because unlike you, who get a steady stream of money even if only sitting on your ass, these people only make a living if someone calls them and asks a job done. If lawyers would charge per effective time spent as much as you would deem negligible on your side, they'd have to work a construction worker job to make a living and do lawyering on the side./
A plumber comes over to repair a broken water heater. He looks at it, taps a pipe with his wrench, and it's fixed. He hands the customer a bill for $500. The customer becomes angry because all the plumber did was tap a pipe, and demands to see an itemized bill.
The plumber dutifully provides the bill:
* Pipe tapping: $5
* Knowing where to tap: $495
I can tap a pipe in a random spot for a lot less than $500.
Customer: $500 for 10 minutes of work? That's more than I make as a brain surgeon.
Plumber: It's more than I made as a brain surgeon too.
pipe tapping: $5
knowing where to tap: $95
taking on the legal liability and accountability in case the water heater explodes: $400
ChatGPT is more than capable of telling you where to tap, but you can't sue openAI if it gets it wrong and your water heater explodes.
When I pushed the others it turns out he was right (except for one especially large firm who basically did everything, but it may as well have been a collection of a dozen different companies). Really appreciated his honesty but was all the more baffled by how the whole industry hadn't already been disrupted.
- You have a problem.
- Someone takes the time to fix that problem for $10k worth of coding time.
- Now they sell 1000s of clients the same software for $99, with 0s of work.
What's is the difference with your case?
You almost certainly work in technology/software. If you (or your employers) sells software in any form, you're doing the same fucking thing.
Their box of templates is equivalent to a library or a SaaS application.
so yeah, not the best analogy.
There totally is. I don't think there's any industry where a customer can really get away with not testing the products of their suppliers. With software you need to test it and confirm you're getting the results you expect, rather than blindly trusting the vendor.
> and any bugs that manifest in said software after purchase treated as the client's fault for not spotting them.
I'm not sure about B2B licenses (I've never been involved in contracts), but I'm pretty sure for a lot of B2C software, the user is responsible for the output and the vendor's liability is severely capped (like no more than refunding the purchase price).
If there is an Excel bug that costs you a lot of money, you the user are responsible. Microsoft's not going to pay you to make you whole (and I'm pretty confident about that, because logically, if it were otherwise the risk to them would be extreme and they'd probably be bankrupt).
If it’s just copy paste templates then you never really needed a lawyer in the first place. Thats paralegal at best
I wonder how easily lawyers will let their industry get disrupted. I think lawyers may be one of the few professions that have the means and the edge to push back.
An absurd claim presented without evidence.
Ngl I'm guilty myself too though.
I remember a much slower change where software slowly ate away the work of property managers. Especially convenient was the ability for the tenant to perform the 6-monthly inspection remotely by uploading a half-dozen photos per room, taking just 15 minutes or so rather than waiting around for several hours for a physical meet up with the property manager. Software also allowed rent payments to be easily automated, collated and monitored.
But I don't think the number of property managers decreased, nor the price that landlords paid for their services.
Feels like a conflict of interests to me, I'd guess friends, neighbors, children and nieces of that judge enjoying their livelihood by charging for legal services. While legal services are now available under substantially lower rates and with a lot fewer conflicts of interests from A.I. providers...
At what point does it become a 5th amendment issue? Maybe when we get AI in our corneas a la Black Mirror's The Entire History of You?
It's more likely to be ruled in your favor if you started the research after being arraigned, and choosing to represent yourself.
But if you were just googling "murder defense theory" and are accused of murder, they'll be able to use that against you.
Chatting with Claude breaks confidentiality: chats with Claude are subject to arbitrary inspection by Anthropic employees, not to mention the issue of model training.
You can use self-hosted LLMs without breaking privilege. And funny enough, law firms like Latham & Watkins are now buying Nvidia GPU clusters for this purpose.
Email and phone calls are considered confidential, even though it is possible for vendors to inspect the communication. I expect AI use will be tested legally, but once precedence has been established in court it will become a common practice.
It's a weak analogy. Ordinary comms infrastructure providers actually have pretty robust policies, technical, and contractual measures in place that restrict employee access to customer communications. In contrast, in the wild west of generative AI, companies actively monitor session data for the content itself, in order to exploit it for their own business purposes. There is zero expectation of privacy.
So I don't share your expectation that precedent will uphold the use of consumer-tier services (in their current form) for handling privileged material.
But there's also a good reason why lawyers can keep charging these fees: because they have a say on who can practice the profession. Unlike software engineers and like doctors, they're in charge and will not allow autonomous systems to represent you or otherwise "practice law". That'd be suicide.
Also, for many services, downward price pressure already exists to some extent, in that there are various "low-stakes" virtual legal firms licensed in multiple states that provide forms you can fill and then file for $50 a pop instead of $500 a pop. But most consumers still prefer to visit a local law office. I'm not sure this will change with AI. I know quite a few people who are keen to self-diagnose using Google or ChatGPT, but I don't know as many inclined to vibecode their articles of incorporation.
It's really one of these white-collar professions that I think is quite secure. Software engineers are hosed to a greater extent, having enthusiastically engineered their own personal hell.
And yet many software developers are hyping themselves into obsolescence by pretending you can't write code by hand anymore.
> New analysis from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) finds that hospital systems are increasingly billing patient hospital stays as more medically complex, driving nearly $1 billion in additional healthcare costs in just two years. [...]
> More than 60% of hospital systems are now using AI-enabled technologies that can scan lab results and electronic records to identify secondary diagnoses, which could move a patient into a higher-severity, higher-reimbursement billing category.
It sounds like AI is making doing that a lot easier, and probably hard to contest what it finds without running extra tests.
That’s why they think it’s BS
Like, obviously only a doctor can diagnose. But, they can use technology to help them look at problems, including AI (literally the most versatile pattern matching software we have, just in natural language and with lower success rates). And they can make their own judgement call on if what the tool output is saying is correct.
However, if a Doctor were to see a bogus secondary diagnosis on their screen, and then dismiss it, they're opening themself up to medical malpractice liability, no? Like, it seems like the safest option would be to run (and bill for) the extra tests to confirm if the AI's story is true or untrue.
But it doesn't seem from the link that they are running extra tests, just that they are charging for the secondary diagnosis. That's odd, if there's liability for not testing or treating it, isn't it?
Legal work in the past involved hiring specialist firms, at exorbitant rates, for specialist work. (And virtually all legal work is specialized.)
Legal work in the future might involve hiring one or two in-house lawyers to handle all work, at a standard salary rate. The crucial skills are simply editing and research. Current/near-future LLMs surpass virtually all specialists in domain knowledge and they do it quickly and for the cost of a few cheap subscriptions.
You only really need a lawyer because a business can't represent itself in court without one.
That said, the rest of the article is on point. AI billing analysis software + internal knowledge of how the sausage gets made has shaved literal millions off bills at this point. I wouldn't expect them to lose money in an absolute sense though. More like a balloon you squeeze from one end.
One thing I came here to say, but turn out not to be the case, was the large jump in associates salaries as an interesting possible driver. I found a handy tracking number that does inflation adjustment. Turns out when you index for inflation, the associate pay scales are more or less flat.
If you want to buy a new PC would you rather just have IBM making PCs and setting the price to whatever they want or a thousand different clone companies all competing on price, features, support, etc?
So some new law firm may want to disrupt the industry with a new model
Think about the adversaries using LLMs to generate ever-increasing preponderous walls of text that are mostly sycophantic and subtly legally blonde. If every adversary to my law firm generates 250% more text than before, our billable hours will balloon accordingly to the time it takes junior partners to read it all, digest it, redact, whatever. In fact, speaking of redacting, perhaps billable hours increase as you proofread your own LLM output. Regardless, LLMs should empower even criminal defendants to become quasi-eloquent and "type" 1,000wpm. It would seem that "reduces billable hours" is a naïve and premature prediction.
It simply put the onus of proof on the taxpayer for historical discrepancies, where the proof often no longer existed, for a subset of the population least able to navigate bureaucracy when those discrepancies were innocuous.
There was no intelligence involved at any level of assessment.
If I'm 25 then sure, probably I need to learn the new technology anyway because my old technology will be obsolete before the end of my career.
Still, if I don't like your new technology, I can just switch industries and you lose an employee. You want to force all employees to learn Python while I'm okay with keeping everything in Java? Oh well, I'll find a Java job then, good luck training someone to replace me.
If I'm close to retirement, then unless you pay up significantly, there's zero reason for me to learn the new technology, and I'll resist as long as I can.
Before we got an infinite amount of AI-generated Indians, software wages were sky high exactly for that reason - in order to incentivize people to learn new technologies (coding).
Of course when it's the employer's market none of that applies and you just suck it up. But again, because minimum wage exists, if I'm working for minimum wage anyway, I'll simply choose the least demanding job where I don't have to learn shit.
And $200 to make a $2000 phone is flat-out wrong - are you being dishonest or just not bothering to check your facts? Two years ago the cost of making the iPhone 16 was pushing $600, and it sold for no more than $1500.
When it is obvious to me, the consumer, that you and most of your competitors are saving massive time and money using new technology, and you're keeping all that margin, my choice is easy.
I will go to the first competitor who wants my business more than keeping their savings, and in a healthy free market economy, that competitor should be very easy to find.
Do we pay more to a lawyer if they handwrite a legal document using expert penmanship?
There aren't any good processes that are accessible to sue lawyers for malpractice like there are for doctors and other professions, their negligence can cause entire companies to go down, but the perpetrators almost never get to pay the price.