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> Laywers hoard their contracts and it was very difficult in our journey to find lawyers who would be willing to write contracts we would turn into templates be

> Laywers hoard their contracts and it was very difficult in our journey to find lawyers who would be willing to write contracts we would turn into templates because they are essentially putting themselves and their professional community out of income streams in the future. I notice same things in other professions, especially where it requires a huge upfront investment in education. For example (at least where I live), there was a time about 20 years ago where architects also didn't want to produce designs that would be then sold to multiple people for cheap. The thinking was that this reduces market for architecture output. But of course it is easy to see that most people do not really need a unique design. So the problem solved itself because the market does not really care and the moment somebody is able to compile a small library of usable designs and a usable business model, as an architect, you can either cooperate to salvage what you can or lose. I believe the same comes for lawyers. Lawyers will live through some harsh time while their easiest and most lucrative work gets automated and the market for their services is going to shrink and whatever work is left for them will be of the more complex kind that the automation can't handle.

adra 3y ago
I think you greatly underestimate this group to retain their position as a monopoly. A huge chunk of politicians are lawyers, and most legal jurisdictions have hard requirements around what work you must have a lawyer to perform. These tools may make their practices more efficient internally, but it doesn't mean that value is being passed on to the consumer of the service in any way. They're a cartel and one with very close relationships with country leadership. I don't see this golden goose souring any time soon.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  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.
  - d0odk 3y ago
    Please elaborate with some examples of what legal work you think will be optimized with AI tools.
    - __loam 3y ago
      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.
      - d0odk 3y ago
        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.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  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.
  - epcoa 3y ago
    > 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?
  - ramoz 3y ago
    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).
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    What is a realistic compromise?
  - rscho 3y ago
    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.
WanderPanda 3y ago
IIRC about 40% of us politicians are lawyers, unfortunately I’m sure they will find a way to gatekeep these revenue streams for their peers.
- pugworthy 3y ago
  I’m assuming by the use of “us” and “they” you meant US - not that you are a politician.
adrianN 3y ago
Lawyers seem to be the prime group to prevent this outcome using some kind regulation. Many politicians are lawyers.
- freejazz 3y ago
  They were lawyers, they aren't still practicing attorneys representing clients.
  - Tostino 3y ago
    They moved into the much more lucrative career of representing corporations.
jacquesm 3y ago
So, you will get the template for free. And then a lawyer has to put it on their letterhead and they charge you the exact same as they do right now for that because that will be made a requirement.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  No. As a business owner you will hire couple lawyers, give them a bunch of programs to automate searching through texts, answering questions and writing legalese based on human description of what is the text supposed to do. These three are from my experience great majority of the work. The 2 people you hire will now perform like 10 people without tools. Then you will use part of that saved money to reduce prices and if you are business savvy, you will use the rest to research the automation further. Then another business that wants to compete with you will no longer have an option, they will have to do this or more to be able to stay in the business at all.
faeriechangling 3y ago
Lawyers are uniquely well equipped to legislate their continued employment into existence.
- tiahura 3y ago
  Lawyers, yes. Junior associates, not so much.
- ABCLAW 3y ago
  Kinda? Lawyers are myopic, vain, and we don't really do much to innovate. We wanted to make sure there would be no cross pollination between legal advisory services and other professional services in most jurisdictions, but the only thing that division did was significantly restrict our ability to widen our service offerings to provide more value. The end result is that we protected our little nest egg while our share of the professional services pie has been getting eaten by consulting and multi-service accounting firms for the past 20 years.
taneq 3y ago
> I notice same things in other professions, especially where it requires a huge upfront investment in education. Doctors, for instance. You hear no end of stories about how incredibly high pressure medicine is with insane hours and stress, but will they increase university placements so they can actually hire enough trained staff to meet the workload? Absolutely fkn not, that would impact salaries.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  University placements aren’t the problem. Medical residencies are funded through Medicare and have been numerically capped. You could graduate a million MDs a year and if none of them have a training pipeline, we still lose.
singleshot_ 3y ago
“easiest and most lucrative work” I think this overlooks a big part of how the legal market works. Our easiest work is only lucrative because we use it to train new lawyers, who bill at a lower rate. To the extent the easy stuff gets automated, 1) it’s going to be impossible to find work as a junior associate and 2) senior attorneys will do the same stuff they did last year. If there’s a decrease in prices for a while, great, but a generation from now it’s going to be a lot harder to find someone knowledgeable because the training pathway will have been destroyed.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
I have no problem with your logic so long as it is applied uniformly to all of society. By that I mean society must abolish copyright, patents and all forms of intellectual property. Otherwise I'll be forced to defend lawyers in this case. Why can people hoard "IP" but lawyers can't hoard contracts?
- TapWaterBandit 3y ago
  I don't think that is the point he is making. More that lawyers will hoard contracts but there will be financial incentives to defect early (the idea being to sell your contracts while the price is high). Then that lawyer's contracts will become the mass-produced "good enough" boilerplate and be used widely driving down the value of hoarding contracts at all.

adra 3y ago

I think you greatly underestimate this group to retain their position as a monopoly. A huge chunk of politicians are lawyers, and most legal jurisdictions have hard requirements around what work you must have a lawyer to perform. These tools may make their practices more efficient internally, but it doesn't mean that value is being passed on to the consumer of the service in any way. They're a cartel and one with very close relationships with country leadership. I don't see this golden goose souring any time soon.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago
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.
- d0odk 3y ago
  Please elaborate with some examples of what legal work you think will be optimized with AI tools.
  - __loam 3y ago
    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.
    - d0odk 3y ago
      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.
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
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.
- epcoa 3y ago
  > 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?
- ramoz 3y ago
  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).
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  What is a realistic compromise?
- rscho 3y ago
  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.

WanderPanda 3y ago

IIRC about 40% of us politicians are lawyers, unfortunately I’m sure they will find a way to gatekeep these revenue streams for their peers.

pugworthy 3y ago
I’m assuming by the use of “us” and “they” you meant US - not that you are a politician.

adrianN 3y ago

Lawyers seem to be the prime group to prevent this outcome using some kind regulation. Many politicians are lawyers.

freejazz 3y ago
They were lawyers, they aren't still practicing attorneys representing clients.
- Tostino 3y ago
  They moved into the much more lucrative career of representing corporations.

jacquesm 3y ago

So, you will get the template for free. And then a lawyer has to put it on their letterhead and they charge you the exact same as they do right now for that because that will be made a requirement.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago
No. As a business owner you will hire couple lawyers, give them a bunch of programs to automate searching through texts, answering questions and writing legalese based on human description of what is the text supposed to do. These three are from my experience great majority of the work. The 2 people you hire will now perform like 10 people without tools. Then you will use part of that saved money to reduce prices and if you are business savvy, you will use the rest to research the automation further. Then another business that wants to compete with you will no longer have an option, they will have to do this or more to be able to stay in the business at all.

faeriechangling 3y ago

Lawyers are uniquely well equipped to legislate their continued employment into existence.

tiahura 3y ago
Lawyers, yes. Junior associates, not so much.
ABCLAW 3y ago
Kinda? Lawyers are myopic, vain, and we don't really do much to innovate. We wanted to make sure there would be no cross pollination between legal advisory services and other professional services in most jurisdictions, but the only thing that division did was significantly restrict our ability to widen our service offerings to provide more value. The end result is that we protected our little nest egg while our share of the professional services pie has been getting eaten by consulting and multi-service accounting firms for the past 20 years.

taneq 3y ago

> I notice same things in other professions, especially where it requires a huge upfront investment in education. Doctors, for instance. You hear no end of stories about how incredibly high pressure medicine is with insane hours and stress, but will they increase university placements so they can actually hire enough trained staff to meet the workload? Absolutely fkn not, that would impact salaries.

singleshot_ 3y ago
University placements aren’t the problem. Medical residencies are funded through Medicare and have been numerically capped. You could graduate a million MDs a year and if none of them have a training pipeline, we still lose.

singleshot_ 3y ago

“easiest and most lucrative work” I think this overlooks a big part of how the legal market works. Our easiest work is only lucrative because we use it to train new lawyers, who bill at a lower rate. To the extent the easy stuff gets automated, 1) it’s going to be impossible to find work as a junior associate and 2) senior attorneys will do the same stuff they did last year. If there’s a decrease in prices for a while, great, but a generation from now it’s going to be a lot harder to find someone knowledgeable because the training pathway will have been destroyed.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

I have no problem with your logic so long as it is applied uniformly to all of society. By that I mean society must abolish copyright, patents and all forms of intellectual property. Otherwise I'll be forced to defend lawyers in this case. Why can people hoard "IP" but lawyers can't hoard contracts?

TapWaterBandit 3y ago
I don't think that is the point he is making. More that lawyers will hoard contracts but there will be financial incentives to defect early (the idea being to sell your contracts while the price is high). Then that lawyer's contracts will become the mass-produced "good enough" boilerplate and be used widely driving down the value of hoarding contracts at all.