You almost certainly work in technology/software. If you (or your employers) sells software in any form, you're doing the same fucking thing.
Their box of templates is equivalent to a library or a SaaS application.
A plumber comes over to repair a broken water heater. He looks at it, taps a pipe with his wrench, and it's fixed. He hands the customer a bill for $500. The customer becomes angry because all the plumber did was tap a pipe, and demands to see an itemized bill.
The plumber dutifully provides the bill:
* Pipe tapping: $5
* Knowing where to tap: $495
I can tap a pipe in a random spot for a lot less than $500.
The lawyers did not properly review the agreements, causing post-signature discovery of major issues and having to redo and execute all the agreements a second time, leading to inflated lawyer bills.
If the lawyer is going to prompt the same AI that I can prompt myself and is not going to review the agreements thoroughly, then it is clear where this is leading.
Because a lawyer selling a contract template, is in many ways, very similar in concept to tech industry selling a software license/seat.
They are both akin to “templates”, and selling IP.
So, if a lawyer bills $1000 for "10 seconds of work", it smells fraudulent.
If $1000 was a flat rate, then it's similar to software: you're purchasing some IP and passing off legal liability to the lawyer. How long the lawyer spent on it doesn't matter.
One can argue that there should be, but billing in 10 second increments might also be a bit much to ask.
One would hope that they would at least aggregate multiple smaller-than-resolution time blocks into one before billing though. (Five documents over the course of a week ends up costing the same)
The fee agreement was an hourly rate for producing a legal document. The resulting document looks like it took 10 seconds to produce. The lawyer billed $1000 worth of hours.
So, either the document was much more complex than anticipated (in which case the lawyer should have said so), or the lawyer inflated the hours.
In reality they'll spend 1 minute grabbing a close-enough template, 10 seconds filling it in, 3 minutes billing you, and 55 minutes double-dipping by doing work for other clients.
Not in principle, but in practice.
It’s hilarious to see people complaining about lawyers being overpaid and incompetent on a forum dedicated to an industry that was completely unregulated up until about a month ago. A lawyer can be disbarred from his profession for making these kinds of mistakes; can you?
The people and their experience is still very valuable, but having been in the business since early 2000s the job shouldn’t be called ‘software developer’ anymore. Even ‘software engineer’ is somewhat inadequate given what the end product is vs what is actually being engineered by humans. ‘Software factory process automation engineer’ maybe counts?
When I pushed the others it turns out he was right (except for one especially large firm who basically did everything, but it may as well have been a collection of a dozen different companies). Really appreciated his honesty but was all the more baffled by how the whole industry hadn't already been disrupted.
- You have a problem.
- Someone takes the time to fix that problem for $10k worth of coding time.
- Now they sell 1000s of clients the same software for $99, with 0s of work.
What's is the difference with your case?
They grift about as hard as tech workers did pre-2022. Relying on the fact that no one can easily audit their work to justify their one hour of actually work despite making easily 300K+ a year.
Please kill their golden goose. Most lawyers are actively harmful to society.
Burn their entire industry to the ground. I welcome making the practice of law an AI-only field and ban humans from working in it to remove prejudice, misconduct, expense. As a former foster parent, I've seen children being delayed justice for weeks because two lawyers couldn't find time for a 15 minute conversation in front a judge. I've hated all lawyers ever since. Gatekeeping priesthood of the 21st century.
Dante's 8th Circle indeed.
It's a critical law currently working its way through congress. It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution. And that's a trend - when things were done by people and for people, they tended to be brief and clear. As lawyers got involved, everything became a convoluted indecipherable mess which may as well be written in Latin.
I took a look at a few random sections of it and didn't see anything undecipherable, other than maybe things that lack enough context because it is written as a diff from the current law.
The comparison to the length of the Constitution makes little sense to me. The Constitution establishes a framework and some power allocations. It says almost nothing about the bazillion lower level details necessary to actual have a functioning county.
Obviously individual sections of a law are going to literally 'decipherable' in the sense that they are written in English, but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government. Or similarly the Bill of Rights lays out some of the most critical rights and restrictions in the US, yet each is no longer than a few sentences which are easily understood.
On the civil side, high-dollar disputes are already litigated. The real potential growth enabled by cheaper legal services will be in small claims. Those courts can be scaled up because they don't require a jury or even a real judge.
If the cost of what a lawyer does today drops to pennies, the system probably needs robo-judges, and/or massive penalties for taking something in front of a human judge when the facts sufficiently completely one sided, as making them pay the winning party's legal fees will become insufficient deterrence.
Maybe courts could be replaced by AI too once it's good enough?
With the right to escalate to human judges of course.
and without turning it into current phone helplines or support chatbots, god please.
This isn’t true at all.
Ahh, the salaryman lament against contract workers (plumbers, car mechanics, lawyers etc): he makes $25/hour, why don't they charge similar or less?
Because unlike you, who get a steady stream of money even if only sitting on your ass, these people only make a living if someone calls them and asks a job done. If lawyers would charge per effective time spent as much as you would deem negligible on your side, they'd have to work a construction worker job to make a living and do lawyering on the side./
Because you'd rather pay your $1000 to OpenAI for 5 milliseconds of work, instead of to a human lawyer for 10 seconds of work?
Enjoy your cheap lawyer tokens while you can.
If the established system can adapt to the disruption, then as consumers we have more choices.
If the established system dies and the disruptor replaced it (DVD rental vs Netflix), then the disruptor, despite their weaknesses, do answer the consumer needs better.
If both the established and disruptive system dies, then maybe they're not that important in the first place.
I remember a much slower change where software slowly ate away the work of property managers. Especially convenient was the ability for the tenant to perform the 6-monthly inspection remotely by uploading a half-dozen photos per room, taking just 15 minutes or so rather than waiting around for several hours for a physical meet up with the property manager. Software also allowed rent payments to be easily automated, collated and monitored.
But I don't think the number of property managers decreased, nor the price that landlords paid for their services.
An absurd claim presented without evidence.
Ngl I'm guilty myself too though.
Feels like a conflict of interests to me, I'd guess friends, neighbors, children and nieces of that judge enjoying their livelihood by charging for legal services. While legal services are now available under substantially lower rates and with a lot fewer conflicts of interests from A.I. providers...
Chatting with Claude breaks confidentiality: chats with Claude are subject to arbitrary inspection by Anthropic employees, not to mention the issue of model training.
You can use self-hosted LLMs without breaking privilege. And funny enough, law firms like Latham & Watkins are now buying Nvidia GPU clusters for this purpose.
Email and phone calls are considered confidential, even though it is possible for vendors to inspect the communication. I expect AI use will be tested legally, but once precedence has been established in court it will become a common practice.
It's a weak analogy. Ordinary comms infrastructure providers actually have pretty robust policies, technical, and contractual measures in place that restrict employee access to customer communications. In contrast, in the wild west of generative AI, companies actively monitor session data for the content itself, in order to exploit it for their own business purposes. There is zero expectation of privacy.
So I don't share your expectation that precedent will uphold the use of consumer-tier services (in their current form) for handling privileged material.
At what point does it become a 5th amendment issue? Maybe when we get AI in our corneas a la Black Mirror's The Entire History of You?
> New analysis from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) finds that hospital systems are increasingly billing patient hospital stays as more medically complex, driving nearly $1 billion in additional healthcare costs in just two years. [...]
> More than 60% of hospital systems are now using AI-enabled technologies that can scan lab results and electronic records to identify secondary diagnoses, which could move a patient into a higher-severity, higher-reimbursement billing category.
Like, obviously only a doctor can diagnose. But, they can use technology to help them look at problems, including AI (literally the most versatile pattern matching software we have, just in natural language and with lower success rates). And they can make their own judgement call on if what the tool output is saying is correct.
However, if a Doctor were to see a bogus secondary diagnosis on their screen, and then dismiss it, they're opening themself up to medical malpractice liability, no? Like, it seems like the safest option would be to run (and bill for) the extra tests to confirm if the AI's story is true or untrue.
It sounds like AI is making doing that a lot easier, and probably hard to contest what it finds without running extra tests.
But there's also a good reason why lawyers can keep charging these fees: because they have a say on who can practice the profession. Unlike software engineers and like doctors, they're in charge and will not allow autonomous systems to represent you or otherwise "practice law". That'd be suicide.
Also, for many services, downward price pressure already exists to some extent, in that there are various "low-stakes" virtual legal firms licensed in multiple states that provide forms you can fill and then file for $50 a pop instead of $500 a pop. But most consumers still prefer to visit a local law office. I'm not sure this will change with AI. I know quite a few people who are keen to self-diagnose using Google or ChatGPT, but I don't know as many inclined to vibecode their articles of incorporation.
It's really one of these white-collar professions that I think is quite secure. Software engineers are hosed to a greater extent, having enthusiastically engineered their own personal hell.
And yet many software developers are hyping themselves into obsolescence by pretending you can't write code by hand anymore.
That said, the rest of the article is on point. AI billing analysis software + internal knowledge of how the sausage gets made has shaved literal millions off bills at this point. I wouldn't expect them to lose money in an absolute sense though. More like a balloon you squeeze from one end.
One thing I came here to say, but turn out not to be the case, was the large jump in associates salaries as an interesting possible driver. I found a handy tracking number that does inflation adjustment. Turns out when you index for inflation, the associate pay scales are more or less flat.
If you want to buy a new PC would you rather just have IBM making PCs and setting the price to whatever they want or a thousand different clone companies all competing on price, features, support, etc?
So some new law firm may want to disrupt the industry with a new model
Think about the adversaries using LLMs to generate ever-increasing preponderous walls of text that are mostly sycophantic and subtly legally blonde. If every adversary to my law firm generates 250% more text than before, our billable hours will balloon accordingly to the time it takes junior partners to read it all, digest it, redact, whatever. In fact, speaking of redacting, perhaps billable hours increase as you proofread your own LLM output. Regardless, LLMs should empower even criminal defendants to become quasi-eloquent and "type" 1,000wpm. It would seem that "reduces billable hours" is a naïve and premature prediction.
If I'm 25 then sure, probably I need to learn the new technology anyway because my old technology will be obsolete before the end of my career.
Still, if I don't like your new technology, I can just switch industries and you lose an employee. You want to force all employees to learn Python while I'm okay with keeping everything in Java? Oh well, I'll find a Java job then, good luck training someone to replace me.
If I'm close to retirement, then unless you pay up significantly, there's zero reason for me to learn the new technology, and I'll resist as long as I can.
Before we got an infinite amount of AI-generated Indians, software wages were sky high exactly for that reason - in order to incentivize people to learn new technologies (coding).
Of course when it's the employer's market none of that applies and you just suck it up. But again, because minimum wage exists, if I'm working for minimum wage anyway, I'll simply choose the least demanding job where I don't have to learn shit.
It simply put the onus of proof on the taxpayer for historical discrepancies, where the proof often no longer existed, for a subset of the population least able to navigate bureaucracy when those discrepancies were innocuous.
There was no intelligence involved at any level of assessment.
Do we pay more to a lawyer if they handwrite a legal document using expert penmanship?