That being said, for many lawyers, the difference is probably indiscernible - too many are stuck in the dark ages.
We fired our corporate lawyer earlier his year because the focus seemed to be on billing hours not solving problems. We found a better and cheaper lawyer who isn’t afraid of piecing together boilerplate to create a rough draft is a short period of time - our previous one had hand written it!!! Insanity.
That's true of all corporate officers. That's why companies put in place incentive structures that align workers' goals with the company's. The idea that in-house counsel are putting the abstract interests of outside counsel ahead of their personal interests in career progression, bonuses, etc., is a very odd one.
> But, your defence of the status quo is to be expected by someone who benefits from it being that way.
This trope ignores the realities of legal billing. There are enormous cost and efficiency pressures in the legal industry. Even for billable-hour matters, clients have a "soft cap" in mind and even the top firms write off 10-20% of billings as a result. Fixed-fee arrangements and hybrid arrangements are also routine. For example, many companies have arrangements where a firm will handle all of the company's litigation in a particular area, or certain portfolios of cases, for a fixed monthly fee. If I'm going to get, say, a million dollars a month to handle a case, regardless of hours, why won't I use some "legal AI" to minimize my investment? If I'm a plaintiff's lawyer, and work entirely on contingency, or doing fixed fee divorces, why wouldn't I leverage every AI tool available?
Your explanation is plausible for the guys billing hours defending Altria from tobacco litigation. But it's laughable as applied to the majority of lawyers.
Also many medium size law firms are using AI systems now. See: https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2018/07/03/tuesday-luminanc... And, https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2018/06/19/israels-tadmor-l... Neither of those two firms are massive, but they both still see the value. Also AI systems are not as expensive as you may think. P.s. I’ve worked in the legal sector for 20 years. Well aware of how billing works, and things now are changing esp. re. Any process level work. May I ask which firm you work at?
There is a lot of noise about the use of AI in other areas of law, but I suspect (in common with other industries) this is just part of the hype cycle. That is not to say that the use of AI is not on the rise, but the article likely overstates its use.
For example, “AI” discovery requires tons of handholding and careful training/QA. The process is so complicated, it’s really only practical for very large document sets. Ironically, these huge document sets only tend to arise in highly valuable commercial litigation, where clients have strong incentives to demand human second level review anyway, mitigating much of the cost advantage. In practice, the biggest advance in discovery in the last 10-15 years has actually been culling document sets based in search terms (“fake” NEAR “testing results”).
The article also takes a jab at legal outsourcing and makes it seem like AI has had a bigger impact than outsourcing. Not so. The trend of clients demanding that low level work be outsourced to contract attorneys has had ten times the impact on law firm economics compared to any legal technology invented in the last decade.
At bottom, the article is based on a fundamental mistake about the industry:
> What kind of repeat buyer lets the seller push the price up every year for doing the same thing in the same way, where the product stays the same and there is no improvement in the outcome? One answer to that is: a buyer who is faced by a monopoly.
Today’s clients are savvy. They’ll bring in half a dozen firms to pitch any substantial matter, getting dozens of hours of free legal analysis from each just as table stakes. Fees are capped, rates are discounted, and success-based fee arrangements are routine. The legal industry is stiffly competitive, even at the very top. (Thanks to conflicts rules, consolidation in law has been limited. So there are dozens of firms that you would consider just the “top firms”).
On the whole, lawyers keep getting more expensive for the same reason as programmers in Silicon Valley or nannies in Manhattan. The stakes are high compared to the costs, and there is a rush to quality even in light of economic concerns.