I think what you are missing is businesses doing what businesses have always been doing: finding a niche for themselves to make a good profit.

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.

Please elaborate with some examples of what legal work you think will be optimized with AI tools.

Sometimes it feels like people look at GPT and think "This thing does words! Law is words! I should start a company!" but they actually haven't worked in legal tech at all and don't know anything about the vertical.

It's a logical reaction, at least superficially, to the touted capabilities of Gen AI and LLMs. But once you start trying to use the tech for actual legal applications, it doesn't do anything useful. It would be great if some mundane legal tasks could be automated away--for example negotiation of confidentiality agreements. One would think that if LLMs are capable of replacing lawyers, they could do something along those lines. But I have not seen any evidence that they can do so effectively, and I have been actively looking into it.

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 think one of the biggest problems with LLMs is the accountibility problem. When a lawyer tells you something, their reputation and career are on the line. There's a large incentive to get things right. LLMs will happily spread believable bullshit.

In fairness some lawyers will too, haha. I take your point, though. Good lawyers care about their reputation and strive to protect it.

Lawyers are legally liable to their clients for their advice, it's a lot more than just reputation and career.

A friend of mine is a highly ranked lawyer, a past general consul of multiple large enterprises. I sent him this paper, he played with ChatGPT-3.5 (not even GPT-4) and contract creation, he said it was 99% fine and then told me he's glad he is slowly retiring from law and is not envious of any up-and-coming lawyers entering the profession. One voice from the vertical.

General Consul? Is he a Roman general ?

That’s why he exited the market - it’s tough out there for Roman consuls and other Latin-based professions generally.

People started companies and succeeded for dumber reasons. Generalized "businessing" skills and placing yourself somewhere in the space where money is made counts for much more than actually knowing anything about specific product beforehand.

That's a very good point.

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.

Lots of corporate and government law work.

It’s just like programmers and artists. As the tools improve, you’ll need fewer, smarter humans.

Yeah, lawyers will go away as soon as doctors do.

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.

> AI has outperformed radiologists for a while now

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?

Do you work in the medical industry? (To be Frank it sounds like you’re spewing bs about a topic you have no intimate knowledge of - seems rather naive actually).

What is a realistic compromise?

I'm a doctor and I've been following this saga for a while. What you wrote does not match my experience. Firstly, you overestimate our political reach by a large margin. If you can have acceptable service for massively cheaper, it will happen regardless of any lobbying. What _is_ true, is that AI systems outperform docs for very select, often trivial situations (e.g. routine chest X-ray). I don't believe this would shrink the market for radiologists significantly. Secondly, the non-trivial work is exceedingly difficult to automate, because those cases currently have a prevalence to complexity ratio that make them impossible to train for. The US are making great strides towards that kind of thing, though. But not available yet.

If you're counting mammograms as routine chest X-rays, AI has been able to outperform and do this substantially cheaper since 2019.

Yet this is not an option for patients, and likely won't be in the next 10 years.

> 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/

The radiologist fee isn't even the majority of the cost of a mammogram in the US. There's a lot more to it that has nothing to do with any radiologist protectionism. AI outperforming on mammograms and a few other basic routine modalities and leading to conclude that this means the AI "outperforms" radiologists in general is like claiming programmers are obsolete because Makefiles can run build commands better. You don't even need AI for most automation. Somehow you still have a job.

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.