> How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it.
I ran multiple businesses for over 20 years, and during that time had to deal with countless contracts involving commercial transactions, leases, funding events and employment. I worked closely with outside counsel, and had to deal with numerous disputes and lawsuits.
Many contracts are boilerplate to begin with, which is why firms like Cooley and Orrick provide free document libraries and generators. They know that a huge segment of the people who might retain them aren't going to pay $10,000 for an NDA or a simple commercial contract. So they give documents away as a marketing tool, hoping that it might get them more complex work in the future.
Attorneys can add value when you have a unique wrinkle and of course when there's a dispute, but, as an example, if you need an employment contract for California, you don't need to pay someone $500/hour to draft one from scratch and frankly for many contract categories, you'd probably be taking on more risk by having a bespoke contract drafted than modifying a solid, widely-used template.
> Your attorney can make better use of AI than you can. A growing time sink for lawyers (and I assume, physicians) is having to explain to clients that "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you," and "no, that's not actually how X works in practice."
You're not wrong, but I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying.
First, as far as contracts are concerned, the leading AIs are more than capable of producing pretty decent ones for many categories because they've been trained against all the real contracts that are out there. Your "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you but..." scenario is real, but it applies less and less than attorneys want to believe, especially when the subject is mundane.
Second, the bigger issue is that AI is fundamentally hindering the development of the next generation of lawyers. It's great that senior associates and partners can use AI to be more efficient, but the economic pressures AI creates mean that it's far harder for law firms to have clients subsidize the training of the next generation of lawyers.
So the question isn't whether an experienced attorney today can make better use of AI than you can, it's whether a new attorney today will be able to become a "good" lawyer when AI is eroding their firms' ability to have clients subsidize their training.
Good points.
For contracts, I was thinking of the more complex deals where a battle-tested template is unavailable. Though even where one appears to fit, it doesn't always. One of the difficulties in professional/client relations is that there are often details that one party sees as minor or completely unremarkable, and the other party sees as changing the whole frame of analysis. I haven't been too impressed with LLMs being able to identify things like this -- they have reams of knowledge, but no practical sense.
The issue about halting the training pipeline is an interesting one. In law firms, a lot of "training" of young lawyers is really glorified bates-stamping charged out at professional rates. I think we could find that the work just gets more substantive and interesting. And yes, pyramid-shaped firms do rely on this type of stuff for revenue. But if all parties can do more sophisticated work, then AI may only nudge forward an arms race without fundamentally changing much (at least for work that has adversarial backpressure).
> For contracts, I was thinking of the more complex deals where a battle-tested template is unavailable
But this is the exception, not the rule because most people are not engaging in "complex" deals that require completely bespoke contracts. The average individual or company needs roughly the same things almost every other individual or company needs and a LegalZoom template is going to be perfectly usable for the 99%, ideally with a final pass by an experienced attorney.
What you're paying for when you do have a "complex" deal is the negotiation and structuring, and that's where the experience of the attorney is all the value.
> The issue about halting the training pipeline is an interesting one. In law firms, a lot of "training" of young lawyers is really glorified bates-stamping charged out at professional rates. I think we could find that the work just gets more substantive and interesting.
You can't run before you know how to walk. I don't know how a new associate becomes the next Clarence Darrow, Johnnie Cochran, or David Boies without thorough exposure to the often-boring basics: legal research, document drafting, document review, organizing and sorting documents, sitting in on calls and depositions, etc.
If clients aren't willing to subsidize these types of activities and firms have to look to automate more to maintain their profitability in the face of cost pressures, the development model breaks down long-term.
I don't know why you're downvoted. People act like lawyers do something magical, but if you have been around business contracts for 2+ decades you can certainly draft one and then just have a lawyer review if you want.
In the US in particular, topics such as law, accounting and medicine are heavily gatekept to the point where many people believe that unless you're a lawyer, accountant or doctor, you shouldn't even be able to discuss these subjects in any meaningful way.