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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Maybe courts could be replaced by AI too once it's good enough?
With the right to escalate to human judges of course.
This isn’t true at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
Do we pay more to a lawyer if they handwrite a legal document using expert penmanship?