When you can hire less lawyers and get more work done and cheaper and at the same (or better) quality, you are going to upend the market for lawyering services.
And this does not require to replace lawyers. It is just enough to equip a lawyer with a set of tools to help them quickly do the typical tasks they are doing.
I work a lot with lawyers and a lot of what they are doing is going to be stupidly easily optimised with AI tools.
One of the top comments on this thread says that LLMs are going to better at summarizing contracts than generating them. I've heard this in legal tech product demos as well. I can see some utility to that--for example, automatically generating abstracts of key terms (like term, expiration, etc.) for high-level visibility. That said, I've been told by legal tech providers that LLMs don't do a great job with some basic things like total contract value.
I question how the document summarizing capabilities of LLMs will impact the way lawyers serve business organizations. Smart businesspeople already know how to read contracts. They don't need lawyers to identify / highlight basic terms. They come to lawyers for advice on close calls--situations where the contract is unclear or contradictory, or where there is a need for guidance on applying the contract in a real-world scenario and assessing risk.
Overall I'm less enthusiastic about the potential for LLMs in the legal space than I was six months ago. But I continue to keep an eye on developments and experiment with new tools. I'd love to get some feedback from others on this board who are knowledgeable.
As a side note, I'm curious if anyone knows about the impact of context window on contract interpretation a lot of contracts are quite long and have sections that are separated by a lot of text that nonetheless interact with each other for purposes of a correct interpretation.
I would add, that sometimes being a newcomer is a benefit. Many times a particular industry is stuck in groupthink, having shared understanding on what is and what isn't possible. And it sometimes requires a person with a fresh perspective to be able to upend it. See example of Elon upending multiple industries by essentially doing exactly that.
It’s just like programmers and artists. As the tools improve, you’ll need fewer, smarter humans.
AI has outperformed radiologists for a while now, and I don't care how much better AI performs, radiologists aren't going away.
Radiologists get to decide the laws of the field essentially.
Why would they vote to kick themselves out of the highest paying job in the world?
Like the medical industry, the legal industry is designed around costing you as much as possible - not really anything related to your benefits.
I just can't see disruption here. The industry will wail against it tooth and nail at every chance.
Refer me to the evidence where AI is outperforming radiologists in the entire body of cross-sectional imaging. Are you seriously claiming that there is AI technology today that can take a brain MRI or CT A/P and produce a full findings and impression without human intervention? You have a reference for that?
Yet this is not an option for patients, and likely won't be in the next 10 years.
Happening in Austria since 2018-ish: https://contextflow.com/
As for Chest Xrays https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.231236 AI has not even demonstrated superiority outside of "routine".
Maybe revisit this in a decade. But your entire argument was that we still have radiologists because of protectionism (and the lawyer case isn’t any more load bearing either). Seems a bit uninformed and premature.
We wanted to make sure there would be no cross pollination between legal advisory services and other professional services in most jurisdictions, but the only thing that division did was significantly restrict our ability to widen our service offerings to provide more value.
The end result is that we protected our little nest egg while our share of the professional services pie has been getting eaten by consulting and multi-service accounting firms for the past 20 years.
Then another business that wants to compete with you will no longer have an option, they will have to do this or more to be able to stay in the business at all.
Doctors, for instance. You hear no end of stories about how incredibly high pressure medicine is with insane hours and stress, but will they increase university placements so they can actually hire enough trained staff to meet the workload? Absolutely fkn not, that would impact salaries.
I think this overlooks a big part of how the legal market works. Our easiest work is only lucrative because we use it to train new lawyers, who bill at a lower rate. To the extent the easy stuff gets automated, 1) it’s going to be impossible to find work as a junior associate and 2) senior attorneys will do the same stuff they did last year. If there’s a decrease in prices for a while, great, but a generation from now it’s going to be a lot harder to find someone knowledgeable because the training pathway will have been destroyed.
More that lawyers will hoard contracts but there will be financial incentives to defect early (the idea being to sell your contracts while the price is high).
Then that lawyer's contracts will become the mass-produced "good enough" boilerplate and be used widely driving down the value of hoarding contracts at all.
I notice same things in other professions, especially where it requires a huge upfront investment in education.
For example (at least where I live), there was a time about 20 years ago where architects also didn't want to produce designs that would be then sold to multiple people for cheap. The thinking was that this reduces market for architecture output. But of course it is easy to see that most people do not really need a unique design.
So the problem solved itself because the market does not really care and the moment somebody is able to compile a small library of usable designs and a usable business model, as an architect, you can either cooperate to salvage what you can or lose.
I believe the same comes for lawyers. Lawyers will live through some harsh time while their easiest and most lucrative work gets automated and the market for their services is going to shrink and whatever work is left for them will be of the more complex kind that the automation can't handle.