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Agreed that this is happening; laundering is pejorative, but AFAICT, the Bar has said it's all kosher so long a lawyer is ultimately responsible for the advice

• ABCLAW 9y ago
  Depends on how the regulator interprets the bar on sharing billings with non-lawyers. Westlaw and Lexis have massive offerings that do a ton to make work easier, so there's obviously room to work with, but they aren't providing products that practice law. They provide tools to practice law with. With ML-driven autonomous determinations of relevance, however, you're literally doing associate legal work 101, with a system applying skill and judgement to the facts of the matter to make a determination of a legal nature. That's a difference in kind. This becomes doubly interesting, because most of these platforms are cloud hosted, so they're not 'given' by the attorney in the way that a land registry look-up would be after being vetted by a clerk. They're a stand-alone service that functionally makes choices for you. I have no clue if Atrium is going down that route, but that's where the million dollar cost savings are. Maybe they're just making snazzier client-focused billing software. I've asked before, but no one will tell me what products they're actually working on.