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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

amicable divorces are like 5% of all divorces, so there's not much to be won there

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.

Emphasis on "so far"

> 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.

in cases where the quality of the output doesn't matter