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 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.
One recent comment from my interviews was that people who use AI are using it for tasks in domains they didnt deal with before. So this would be creating dashboards or writing sql queries. Or reading and reviewing contracts.
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.
> 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.
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.
Demand for law related things isn't elastic. In fact, in an increasingly unemployed, AI first future, work law is a dead end, contract law is a dead end, and there will not be "AI law" jobs created.
"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.
Labor law will be hit more by widespread use of robotics, but I can envision a much larger market for contract disputes and transactional law. Having AI in both sides doesn’t mean people won’t disagree about stuff.
What is an "AI first future"? Infinitely capable robots and AI? All current laws and regulations suddenly gone or changed?
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?
> Demand for law related things isn't elastic.
Of course it is. When someone is thinking of suing someone else the first thing that gives them pause is the potential legal costs.
Which hasn't changed, because the company you would have sued that was spending 200k on a lawyer is now spending 500k worth of tokens to spend the next consecutive 300 hours without sleep to find out that you took an unauthorised 5.1 minute shit on April 23 at 3PM by reviewing every single hour of camera footage and establishing a physical movement map of MAC addresses based on proximity to the WiFi relays they put every 10 meters.
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.
If AI eats law, then AI must also eat judgement (either judge or jury) for the bulk of cases.
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.