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Here’s something scary I recently learned: Cedar-Sinai in LA (major hospital) used to have 15 lawyers on contracts. Now they have 1 and an AI app reviewing cont

Here’s something scary I recently learned: Cedar-Sinai in LA (major hospital) used to have 15 lawyers on contracts. Now they have 1 and an AI app reviewing contracts. Those are 14 lawyers gone. That’s more than 3% on “productivity”, but 14 people who lost their jobs. And that’s now with the current state of things.

broken_clock 2y ago
Can you share a source/article?
linkregister 2y ago
Do you have an article that has more information about this? I'd really like to learn more about what happened.
NBJack 2y ago
Going to be interesting to see the MTTL (mean time to lawsuit) on this. Sounds grossly negligent. I feel kinda sorry for the lonely lawyer.
- DannyBee 2y ago
  Highly doubtful it is either negligence, or something they will get sued over. I don't even quite understand what you think they will get sued over. Most of the policing would happen by courts and bar associations.
- schmookeeg 2y ago
  As someone who spends a lot of time battling mis-use/over-use of PII constantly, I am adopting MTTL as a term of art. :D
  - hx8 2y ago
    MTTL really applies more to a startup portfolio, has long does the average startup from an incubator operate before it receives it's first lawsuit. For your situation, you really want to measure how many PII records you handle per lawsuit. That way you can accurately measure the lawsuit cost per record and compare it to revenue per record to see if you're profitable.
DannyBee 2y ago
Lawyer here - there are fields, and law is definitely one of them, where labor is the major cost. That labor is not often used sanely. It is common to use lawyers costing hundreds per hour to do fairly basic document review and summarization. That is, to produce a fairly simple artifact. Not legal research, not opinionated briefing. But literal: Read these documents, produce a summary of what they say. While I can't say this is the same as what you are talking about ("contracts review" means many things to many people), i'm not even the slightest bit surprised that AI is starting to replace remarkably inefficient uses of labor in law. I will add: Lots of funding being thrown at AI legal startups around on products that do document review and summarization, but that's not the big fish, and will be commodity very quickly. So i expect there will be an ebb and flow of these sorts of products as the startups either move on to things that enable them to capture a meaningful market (document review ain't it), or die and leave these companies hanging :)
- azinman2 2y ago
  But how do you know if AI is able to pick out the salient bits for summarization? Like some nasty point poison pill hidden in there? Wouldn’t you want an expert for such things?
  - chefandy 2y ago
    Your last statement hints at a big consideration: accountability. One lawyer on a formerly 15 lawyer staff is accountable for 15 lawyers worth of potential mistakes, and we know that “but the AI did it!” doesn’t hold water in law.
    - DannyBee 2y ago
      There's a bunch of assumptions here. The main one i think is probably wrong is that there was 15 lawyers worth of work being done before (when measured by some average lawyer standard). For example, it's possible there was only really 1 lawyer worth of work being split 15 ways, so each lawyer was really only responsible for 1/15th of an average lawyers amount of work :) In that scenario, they'd only be responsible for 1 average lawyers worth of mistakes now. Is that realistic? Who knows. I've definitely seen that level of "waste" (for lack of a better term) before in law firms :) Even in the scenario you are positing, it's not obvious it matters as much as you seem to think it does. If the per-lawyer mistake rate was low enough, it may be that 15x that rate simply does not matter. These kinds of contracts are fairly standardized, and so they are mostly looking at the differences from last time. Those differences are often not legal as much as factual. IE the table of costs changed, not the legal responsibility. So the main thing mistakes get you is maybe cost (if mistakes matter at all). This isn't like they are seeing brand new from scratch contracts constantly that require brand new analysis. Even if they were, like I said, the main issue with a mistake is cost. For all we know, the AI company also agreed to indemnify them for a certain rate of mistakes or something (which wouldn't be hard to get insurance for). I'm not actually a fan of AI taking necessary jobs, but I think the view here that this is sort of life or death is strange. I'd be much more worried about AI handling criminal defense in some semi-autonomous fashion than this.
seunosewa 2y ago
That's great. That means potentially slightly cheaper healthcare. A company shouldn't need so many lawyers unless it's a legal firm.

broken_clock 2y ago

Can you share a source/article?

linkregister 2y ago

Do you have an article that has more information about this? I'd really like to learn more about what happened.

NBJack 2y ago

Going to be interesting to see the MTTL (mean time to lawsuit) on this. Sounds grossly negligent. I feel kinda sorry for the lonely lawyer.

DannyBee 2y ago
Highly doubtful it is either negligence, or something they will get sued over. I don't even quite understand what you think they will get sued over. Most of the policing would happen by courts and bar associations.
schmookeeg 2y ago
As someone who spends a lot of time battling mis-use/over-use of PII constantly, I am adopting MTTL as a term of art. :D
- hx8 2y ago
  MTTL really applies more to a startup portfolio, has long does the average startup from an incubator operate before it receives it's first lawsuit. For your situation, you really want to measure how many PII records you handle per lawsuit. That way you can accurately measure the lawsuit cost per record and compare it to revenue per record to see if you're profitable.

DannyBee 2y ago

Lawyer here - there are fields, and law is definitely one of them, where labor is the major cost. That labor is not often used sanely. It is common to use lawyers costing hundreds per hour to do fairly basic document review and summarization. That is, to produce a fairly simple artifact. Not legal research, not opinionated briefing. But literal: Read these documents, produce a summary of what they say. While I can't say this is the same as what you are talking about ("contracts review" means many things to many people), i'm not even the slightest bit surprised that AI is starting to replace remarkably inefficient uses of labor in law. I will add: Lots of funding being thrown at AI legal startups around on products that do document review and summarization, but that's not the big fish, and will be commodity very quickly. So i expect there will be an ebb and flow of these sorts of products as the startups either move on to things that enable them to capture a meaningful market (document review ain't it), or die and leave these companies hanging :)

azinman2 2y ago
But how do you know if AI is able to pick out the salient bits for summarization? Like some nasty point poison pill hidden in there? Wouldn’t you want an expert for such things?
- chefandy 2y ago
  Your last statement hints at a big consideration: accountability. One lawyer on a formerly 15 lawyer staff is accountable for 15 lawyers worth of potential mistakes, and we know that “but the AI did it!” doesn’t hold water in law.
  - DannyBee 2y ago
    There's a bunch of assumptions here. The main one i think is probably wrong is that there was 15 lawyers worth of work being done before (when measured by some average lawyer standard). For example, it's possible there was only really 1 lawyer worth of work being split 15 ways, so each lawyer was really only responsible for 1/15th of an average lawyers amount of work :) In that scenario, they'd only be responsible for 1 average lawyers worth of mistakes now. Is that realistic? Who knows. I've definitely seen that level of "waste" (for lack of a better term) before in law firms :) Even in the scenario you are positing, it's not obvious it matters as much as you seem to think it does. If the per-lawyer mistake rate was low enough, it may be that 15x that rate simply does not matter. These kinds of contracts are fairly standardized, and so they are mostly looking at the differences from last time. Those differences are often not legal as much as factual. IE the table of costs changed, not the legal responsibility. So the main thing mistakes get you is maybe cost (if mistakes matter at all). This isn't like they are seeing brand new from scratch contracts constantly that require brand new analysis. Even if they were, like I said, the main issue with a mistake is cost. For all we know, the AI company also agreed to indemnify them for a certain rate of mistakes or something (which wouldn't be hard to get insurance for). I'm not actually a fan of AI taking necessary jobs, but I think the view here that this is sort of life or death is strange. I'd be much more worried about AI handling criminal defense in some semi-autonomous fashion than this.

seunosewa 2y ago

That's great. That means potentially slightly cheaper healthcare. A company shouldn't need so many lawyers unless it's a legal firm.