I think that within a few years, most lawyers will expect that clients will have run contracts through an LLM prior to sending them to outside counsel. Emails will be along the lines of:
Please see attached contract we received from [counterparty]. ChatGPT says blah, blah and blah should be revised. What do you think? Is there anything else that we should change?
Right. That will reduce workload for the lawyers. But will their fees then go down? I'm kinda worried that if I don't give them the LLM produced legal docs for review they will just use the LLM themselves and then charge me for the work the LLM did :-)
It's bit like with doctors, you'll want a second opinion, if you can afford it.
TBD. Probably depends on whether what you're paying for is access to their lawyer-level LLM, which they would run it through, or for actual expertise.
Probably for important deals, detailed human review will be expected.
Maybe the real value-add will be the insertion of language that LLMs won't be able to figure out, but which will be favorable for the side that inserted them.