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Lawyers famously don't care about productivity because they are paid by the hour.

• observationist 3y ago
  Lawyers will usually bill at a 1 hour minimum, occasionally 30 minutes. Lawyer A cares about productivity, and is paid by the hour, and so charges 1 hour of doc review at $4000, using the latest greatest technology, and is able to bill 1 hour of doc review to 100 clients. He begins to charge $3500/hr to undercut competition, and intersperses each week of work with training his paralegals and associates to amplify their capabilities. Law Firm B doesn't care about productivity, and bills 1 hour of doc review at $4000 to 100 clients, but have to pay 100 lawyers in turn. Several weeks later, their clients have left for the cheaper, higher quality competition. Being paid hourly doesn't mean you benefit from inefficiency. Small hungry shops who can rapidly embrace and integrate new technology are going to eat giant firms alive. When you can set up agents to replace employees, consultants, contractors, and so on, even if the AI is only 90% as good as the average human, that's a staggering advantage for fast movers.
  • LunaSea 3y ago
    > Being paid hourly doesn't mean you benefit from inefficiency. That is exactly what it means and what happened. Lawyers are one of the last professions to move to the digital world. For ages work was still done on paper and even right now most law firms don't use any non-LLM content search, autocompletes, content organisation, that could be considered "modern".