Lawyer here (non practicing so to be clear none of this affects me):
most comments I read here don't seem to realize that different areas of law have very very different economic models and don't even mention which one they think will be affected or why, they just sort of lump it all together.
For example: It is highly unlikely llms will have any meaningful effect on high value personal injury law - I don't see a 5 million dollar case being handed to an LLM when the majority of the cost is in trial aids and not even lawyers. It may affect where and how they advertise. It may affect how they work. But it seems really unlikely to put any of them out of business any time soon by people doing it themselves.
Will it affect other areas more? Maybe. Probably? But so far I haven't seen a ton of comments that make specific enough arguments that they could really be debated or responded to effectively with a useful opinion
> them out of business any time soon
No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected. You wont want or need associate attorneys when you can hire a brilliant AI associate for 1/10th the price.
> You wont want or need associate attorneys
In commercial law, the business model is to rent the associates out to clients at rates higher than you pay (d/t your supervision). No client will pay $350/hour for your AI.
And for direct billing, it's not your interest to do things faster for the client (at risk of making a mistake).
So the real question is whether these pay-by-the-hour models will die as a result of competition from fixed-price transactions made viable via automation. I think not because the entire difficulty of legal work is that it's a complex bundle of issues until you sort them out; once sorted, there's really little to do other than execute (read: paralegals).
Corporate lawyer at big law firm here. I believe the model will be like this: we will review your 1000 agreements but with AI. AI is generally accurate but has some risks, if you agree we will charge you less. The client will agree. Instead of spending 300-400 hours to review the ageeements AI will do instantly. A lawyer will spend the time on reviewing the red flags identified and draft a report. We already do the same with translation. Before computer translation became good (i.e pre-Deepl era), we used to translate documents (cease and desist letters, court petitions etc.) ourselves. Now we offer AI translation free of charge. If client wants reliance on the translation we charge a small bit. Lawfirms are also under pressure for meeting internal budgets. Most clients ask for capped fees. If you charge 10k for a job to a client and the hourly costs ramp up to 20k, the management criticises the partner, the associates become unwilling to work for the partner (as their hours get written off). So with AI law firms can bet more competitively as the cost (human attorney hours) are reduced.
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> No client will pay $350/hour for your AI.
But they may be willing to pay $200/hour for your AI (plus, of course, your final expertise in the matter as the lawyer), and the firm can ditch the paralegals and pocket the difference.
The point is, if you need fewer grunts doing the busywork, you can charge less and be competitive.
There's a middle area too between your options - a law firm that utilizes AI offers cheaper pricing than the current firms for the same work. Ideally competition will drive prices down but of course law doesn't have the benefit of do-overs on cases, so reputation still plays a big factor.
That's the big question, how prices evolve if LLMs increase supply. Standard economic theory says that prices must collapse. There is probably still a short time of 2-5 years where AI native firms can pocket in quite some arbitrage but I guess markets will eventually figure it out and prices will collapse. This is not only for law. The same applies to all the other industries where LLMs can be used to automate work tasks.
> No client will pay $350/hour for your AI.
But they already do! There are cases of professional service firms creating their reports using LLMs, there have even been a few prominent scandals re the fake data generated in them
It is in litigation as well. The issue is that corporate clients are demanding AI. They don’t want to pay associates to do a first draft, they want senior partner to just push the ChatGPT button and then check it.
> No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected.
Whether everyone at the labs knows it or not, this it what they are doing to entire industries, starting with software: Embrace, extend, and extinguish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
What a time to be alive!!?
They came for software first. It was the industry that was “eating the world”. Mathematicians were also affected. Because math was also “code” thanks to Lean. It was collateral damage.
Now they’re coming for lawyers. Law also has “code”. It’s text-based. It’s arms extend to every industry.
Who knows who’s next.
How is it brilliant? One mistake can end a lawyer's career. And with the true costs of these LLMs they might not even be economical.
It'll be like software. The demand for both software and legal services is effectively infinite. If it becomes cheaper to file lawsuits then we'll get more lawsuits, not the same number of lawsuits at a lower price.
There will still be jobs for competent associate attorneys to prompt LLMs and review output. But frankly a lot of attorneys — especially many of those who attended "Third Tier Toilet" (TTT) law schools — were always a waste of money and should have never entered the profession in the first place.
There is a huge problem in at least family law where a tactic is to simply ddos your opponent with motions and frivolous complaints until someone runs out of money and settles. I'm watching someone finally successfully defend themselves using a Harvey like tool they built themselves. An appellate attorney they consulted with recently, told them they had never seen anyone going pro se get as far as they had in appellate court. So I'm hoping that this serves as a return to making the legal system more accessible, and not just something used to railroad people.
You can’t 10x the number of lawsuits, as the courts are already at capacity. If frivolous lawsuits become common they’ll just change the laws to require a greater damages for it to be heard.
Lawsuits are just one type of legal services. There will also be more contract reviews, more cease-and-desist letters, more patent applications, more regulatory comments, more license applications, etc. Although I do expect legislatures will eventually budget for expanding civil court systems in response to lobbying from business groups to speed up trials.
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Can AI replace divorce lawyers? Marriage has no friction, but divorce is high friction. Made impossibly expensive and time consuming because of the cartel of divorce industry.
There are hundreds if not thousands of divorce lawyers. How is it a “cartel?”
Divorce is expensive because divorces are acrimonious and people in that situation would rather spend the assets fucking each other over than letting the other person get them.
In France many divorces are uncontested, but you're still require to use a lawyer (the same for both spouses).
On the other hand most couples with kids are not married, so the separation doesn't require a lawyer...
Divorce is expensive because it is big bucks for the lawyers and family court cartel. They have a vested interest in not changing the laws. When laws are made fair, and the perverse incentives to divorce are lessened, divorce rates plunge. However, divorce lawyers lobby against these laws.
Kentucky became the first state to pass a law making equally shared custody the default arrangement in divorces and separations.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/the-equal-custody-experiment...: Divorce Plunged in Kentucky. Equal Custody for Fathers Is a Big Reason Why.
"Cartel" has a meaning. Explain how either of those things is a cartel?
AI will likely replace divorce lawyers (or, at least make existing divorce lawyers much more efficient) - for non-contested divorces that are amicable. Roughly 95% of what a divorce lawyer does in that context is entirely automatable.
A template document and some software already does it without an LLM. Advising the clients on what it means and what they have to do is unfortunately something AI assistants are bad at. But this use case is not an expensive use case for family lawyers; court systems already try to make this type of settlement accessible to pro se people.
amicable divorces are like 5% of all divorces, so there's not much to be won there
You may have misread that statistic, it's exactly the opposite: around 5% divorces are not resolved amicably and proceed to be litigated in court.
Divorce is extremely cheap if you both agree on everything. Its literally one of the options on the divorce filing. You just pay the court fees. The problem is both parties rarely agree on everything and that's when it gets expensive.
There’s an argument to be made if divorce was easier than more people might get married when they are less serious. My view though is make it harder to get married and easier to get divorced.
"Marriage has no friction" is only something that could be written by someone who was never married.
He clearly meant getting married has no friction, while getting out of a marriage has quite a bit. Presumably there’s friction in the marriage otherwise why would they get divorced.
> Made impossibly expensive
huh? Many/most are no-fault jurisdictions with strict rules on dividing community property. Divorce is easy and cheap, unless it's hard to find assets.
It's not just the divorce lawyers. We have 3x as many lawyers per capita in the US as in the 1970s. The system is designed by lawyers for lawyers. They will create more bureaucracy and more procedure to consume any surplus.
> the cartel of divorce industry
So like a group of lawyers among the "divorce industry" who set prices for divorce and stuff? or wtf do you mean?
Personal injury attorney. AI is entrenched of every single phase of litigation, from the busywork of getting records, research, developing case theory and themes, expert selection, expert collaboration, negotiating, drafting demands, drafting pleadings, drafting discovery, drafting discovery responses, deposition prep, motion practice, jury selection, voir dire, opening statements, witness direct outlines, witness cross outlines, closing statements, and appeals.
Yeah, this matches my friends - they use LLM's for tons of things, using Eve and such. But nobody is replacing the lawyers themselves in cases of any value.
I also have friends in the world of high-volume personal injury (IE the morgan and morgan's of the world) but they also aren't being replaced by LLMs so far.
Emphasis on "so far"
I'd love to get your thoughts on the current frontier models for law, or a link to anything you've written on the subject. Where do you think they're at?
LLMs will never replace human experts.
The word “never” is a dangerous word. In my lifetime I have seen it many times where something was supposed to “never” happen only to see it happen a few years later.
I'll buy that - but, how often does one need an honest-to-goodness expert? 99% of the time most people's requirements can be satisfied with general-competence, and, while the AI systems we have today are mostly only generally competent in porting code from one language to another - they are getting consistently better. I expect we'll start to see general competence in many more areas in the next few years.
> I'll buy that - but, how often does one need an honest-to-goodness expert?
Any time you are doing anything important, where the outcome actually matters. For example, I was recently applying for a study permit and if I generated my application using an LLM instead of consulting with an immigration lawyer and writing it myself, I would not have gotten my study permit. I was recently applying for internships, and if I hadn't paid a real recruiter to review my resume and advise me, I would not have gotten my interview. And trust me, I spent at least an hour trying to get an LLM to generate what I wanted, but no matter how I begged or described what I wanted, it was no use. Good luck fine tuning an LLM to be good at any of this.
> they are getting consistently better
No, they are not getting better, and they will never replace an actual human expert, because a human expert has the actual experience and up-to-date knowledge of what they are an expert at, and also all the complementary context and the current state of affairs in that area. The LLM has none of that.
LLMs are replacing human experts
in cases where the quality of the output doesn't matter
Many people have very low quality thresholds
Then hopefully at some point they get to experience the consequences of having low quality thresholds, and perhaps then their quality thresholds will increase.
This is a weirdly reductive take.
There are plenty of areas where a "low bar" is more than enough. "low" doesn't necessarily mean bad here, it can simply mean "not the best".
I would argue the majority (in the true sense of the word) of white-collar service work does not require an expert.
It requires someone who has reasonable qualifications in the given field, and the motivation ($) to help you with your task.
So no one needs a top-shelf $900/hour lawyer to draw up a basic low-stakes contract where both parties agree to all the terms as written. You just need someone to ensure that the contract is legally valid as written.
Are implying that an LLM can accurately evaluate whether a contract is legally valid?
Or in the long term, no new experts are being made because no companies want to sponsor the slow work and resources that becoming an expert take
Are you aware of what frontier AI has done to mathematics in the last 6 months?
Lol no one cares. Most of that is smoke and mirrors anyways. Stokes was plagiarized. Most of these "breakthrough" solutions are actually present in the training data and in the prompts researchers and mathematicians input into ChatGPT themselves, prompts OpenAI then steals even when you don't agree to improve the model.
PS: I use LLMs every day, basically let Codex write most of my code (after 15+ years of professional programming), these are amazing tools, smart in some ways, but completely demented in others. People just need to fucking stop being AI doomers and AI coomers. Is this technology great? Yes. Is it worth 10 trillion? Hell fucking no. If we get to a point where RSI is a thing, then maybe. So far it's not a thing and its not even close.
I suppose not. I am not a mathematician, and there has been too much drama to understand anything.
Turned it in to fuel for the OpenAI PR dept.?
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There's a huge problem on here - many people stepping outside of their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge.
Its teh same reason claude for finance hasn't turned the finance world upside down.
This is getting tiresome seriously. Why wont these geeks learn some lessons?
Yeah geeks just stop trying! Seriously? Yeah, we’re in a bubble and narratives are ahead of reality but if you really don’t think AI is and will continue to eat knowledge work, just keep making your buggy whips.
Many people stepping in their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge
i agree with this, maybe.
One of the things I've been noticing are lawyers getting annoyed when they realized you spent time working a matter with an LLM. In the cases I've seen, it had nothing to do with the quality of what came out of the LLM. It seems to be related to --and this is only my perspective-- a reality where now reasonably intelligent/experienced clients are coming to them with a case fairly well digested, whereas before they would have to pay the law firm tens of thousands of dollars to ingest documentation and information and do the digestion.
In a couple of instances I've come to the table better informed about the relevant law and case history than the attorneys were. In many ways I think this is a matter of people understanding that none of us are infinite human databases, so you can't know everything. Instead of rejecting LLMs (perhaps being passive-aggressive), they should embrace them as well as better-informed clients.
Having used LLMs for software development I know full well just how terrible they can be if you don't know what you are doing, don't guide the work correctly, etc. So I am not taking legal LLM analysis as ground truth, but it isn't garbage either.