5 ms·

Lawyer here (non practicing so to be clear none of this affects me): most comments I read here don't seem to realize that different areas of law have very ver

Lawyer here (non practicing so to be clear none of this affects me): most comments I read here don't seem to realize that different areas of law have very very different economic models and don't even mention which one they think will be affected or why, they just sort of lump it all together. For example: It is highly unlikely llms will have any meaningful effect on high value personal injury law - I don't see a 5 million dollar case being handed to an LLM when the majority of the cost is in trial aids and not even lawyers. It may affect where and how they advertise. It may affect how they work. But it seems really unlikely to put any of them out of business any time soon by people doing it themselves. Will it affect other areas more? Maybe. Probably? But so far I haven't seen a ton of comments that make specific enough arguments that they could really be debated or responded to effectively with a useful opinion

3ddsaa 15d ago
There's a huge problem on here - many people stepping outside of their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge. Its teh same reason claude for finance hasn't turned the finance world upside down. This is getting tiresome seriously. Why wont these geeks learn some lessons?
- grosswait 15d ago
  Yeah geeks just stop trying! Seriously? Yeah, we’re in a bubble and narratives are ahead of reality but if you really don’t think AI is and will continue to eat knowledge work, just keep making your buggy whips.
- dhanizael 15d ago
  i agree with this, maybe.
- consensus1 15d ago
  Many people stepping in their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge
intrasight 15d ago
> them out of business any time soon No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected. You wont want or need associate attorneys when you can hire a brilliant AI associate for 1/10th the price.
- goldlimetea 15d ago
  [dead]
- consumer451 15d ago
  > No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected. Whether everyone at the labs knows it or not, this it what they are doing to entire industries, starting with software: Embrace, extend, and extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... What a time to be alive!!?
  - ozgung 14d ago
    They came for software first. It was the industry that was “eating the world”. Mathematicians were also affected. Because math was also “code” thanks to Lean. It was collateral damage. Now they’re coming for lawyers. Law also has “code”. It’s text-based. It’s arms extend to every industry. Who knows who’s next.
    - consumer451 14d ago
      What's next is capturing all of our audio and visual inputs from cradle to grave, so that we can be truly replaced. Honestly, if that happened in a 100% trusted environment, it might be cool. But, there is no money in that. Well, maybe Apple would do that? Private Cloud Compute is cool af. Still, we are far more likely fully cooked than fully trustworthy personal AI agents happening at scale.
- w10-1 15d ago
  > You wont want or need associate attorneys In commercial law, the business model is to rent the associates out to clients at rates higher than you pay (d/t your supervision). No client will pay $350/hour for your AI. And for direct billing, it's not your interest to do things faster for the client (at risk of making a mistake). So the real question is whether these pay-by-the-hour models will die as a result of competition from fixed-price transactions made viable via automation. I think not because the entire difficulty of legal work is that it's a complex bundle of issues until you sort them out; once sorted, there's really little to do other than execute (read: paralegals).
rayiner 15d ago
I'd love to get your thoughts on the current frontier models for law, or a link to anything you've written on the subject. Where do you think they're at?
dprkh 15d ago
LLMs will never replace human experts.
- calvinmorrison 15d ago
  LLMs are replacing human experts
  - dprkh 15d ago
    in cases where the quality of the output doesn't matter
    - dimitri-vs 15d ago
      Many people have very low quality thresholds
      - dprkh 15d ago
        Then hopefully at some point they get to experience the consequences of having low quality thresholds, and perhaps then their quality thresholds will increase.
        sbarre 15d ago
        This is a weirdly reductive take. There are plenty of areas where a "low bar" is more than enough. "low" doesn't necessarily mean bad here, it can simply mean "not the best". I would argue the majority (in the true sense of the word) of white-collar service work does not require an expert. It requires someone who has reasonable qualifications in the given field, and the motivation ($) to help you with your task. So no one needs a top-shelf $900/hour lawyer to draw up a basic low-stakes contract where both parties agree to all the terms as written. You just need someone to ensure that the contract is legally valid as written.
        dprkh 15d ago
thelastgallon 15d ago
Can AI replace divorce lawyers? Marriage has no friction, but divorce is high friction. Made impossibly expensive and time consuming because of the cartel of divorce industry.
- ghshephard 15d ago
  AI will likely replace divorce lawyers (or, at least make existing divorce lawyers much more efficient) - for non-contested divorces that are amicable. Roughly 95% of what a divorce lawyer does in that context is entirely automatable.
  - byzantinegene 15d ago
    amicable divorces are like 5% of all divorces, so there's not much to be won there
    - Aramgutang 15d ago
      You may have misread that statistic, it's exactly the opposite: around 5% divorces are not resolved amicably and proceed to be litigated in court.
  - mountainb 14d ago
    A template document and some software already does it without an LLM. Advising the clients on what it means and what they have to do is unfortunately something AI assistants are bad at. But this use case is not an expensive use case for family lawyers; court systems already try to make this type of settlement accessible to pro se people.
- rayiner 15d ago
  There are hundreds if not thousands of divorce lawyers. How is it a “cartel?” Divorce is expensive because divorces are acrimonious and people in that situation would rather spend the assets fucking each other over than letting the other person get them.
tiahura 15d ago
Personal injury attorney. AI is entrenched of every single phase of litigation, from the busywork of getting records, research, developing case theory and themes, expert selection, expert collaboration, negotiating, drafting demands, drafting pleadings, drafting discovery, drafting discovery responses, deposition prep, motion practice, jury selection, voir dire, opening statements, witness direct outlines, witness cross outlines, closing statements, and appeals.
- DannyBee 15d ago
  Yeah, this matches my friends - they use LLM's for tons of things, using Eve and such. But nobody is replacing the lawyers themselves in cases of any value. I also have friends in the world of high-volume personal injury (IE the morgan and morgan's of the world) but they also aren't being replaced by LLMs so far.
  - fittingopposite 15d ago
    Emphasis on "so far"
    - enraged_camel 14d ago
      Yeah. Let's not forget that just a year ago, those of us in tech could not conceive of developers getting replaced by AI. Things have come so far since then however that there are multiple studies showing junior developer hiring has slowed down to a crawl.
robomartin 15d ago
One of the things I've been noticing are lawyers getting annoyed when they realized you spent time working a matter with an LLM. In the cases I've seen, it had nothing to do with the quality of what came out of the LLM. It seems to be related to --and this is only my perspective-- a reality where now reasonably intelligent/experienced clients are coming to them with a case fairly well digested, whereas before they would have to pay the law firm tens of thousands of dollars to ingest documentation and information and do the digestion. In a couple of instances I've come to the table better informed about the relevant law and case history than the attorneys were. In many ways I think this is a matter of people understanding that none of us are infinite human databases, so you can't know everything. Instead of rejecting LLMs (perhaps being passive-aggressive), they should embrace them as well as better-informed clients. Having used LLMs for software development I know full well just how terrible they can be if you don't know what you are doing, don't guide the work correctly, etc. So I am not taking legal LLM analysis as ground truth, but it isn't garbage either.
eqmvii 14d ago
I think this is key. Lawyers make a lot of money for being experts on the sidelines of disputes with values greatly in excess of their fees. They were never paid for their busy work.
sloob 14d ago
Worked for years for personal injury lawyers as an assistant/clerk. Work as a programmer now, tho. I agree that a LLM cannot do a lawyer's job on its own. Especially a trial lawyer's - which involves appearance and performance in a court room. But LLMs are having a massive impact on anything involving digestion of documents (medical records, pleadings, briefs, blah blah) and creation of documents (demand letters, pleadings, correspondence, etc etc) - like 90% of the work. What's happening is very similar to software engineering - the ladder is getting pulled up for entry level and paralegal work.
aswegs8 14d ago
What do you think about patent law?
iw2rmb 12d ago
"highly unlikely" as in "it's expensive because expected to be executed by professionals" happens already. https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/deloitte-ai-australia-government-report-hallucinations-technology-290000-refund/ https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/deloitte-ai-australia-governm... Regulation always lags.

3ddsaa 15d ago

There's a huge problem on here - many people stepping outside of their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge. Its teh same reason claude for finance hasn't turned the finance world upside down. This is getting tiresome seriously. Why wont these geeks learn some lessons?

grosswait 15d ago
Yeah geeks just stop trying! Seriously? Yeah, we’re in a bubble and narratives are ahead of reality but if you really don’t think AI is and will continue to eat knowledge work, just keep making your buggy whips.
dhanizael 15d ago
i agree with this, maybe.
consensus1 15d ago
Many people stepping in their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge

intrasight 15d ago

> them out of business any time soon No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected. You wont want or need associate attorneys when you can hire a brilliant AI associate for 1/10th the price.

goldlimetea 15d ago
[dead]
consumer451 15d ago
> No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected. Whether everyone at the labs knows it or not, this it what they are doing to entire industries, starting with software: Embrace, extend, and extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... What a time to be alive!!?
- ozgung 14d ago
  They came for software first. It was the industry that was “eating the world”. Mathematicians were also affected. Because math was also “code” thanks to Lean. It was collateral damage. Now they’re coming for lawyers. Law also has “code”. It’s text-based. It’s arms extend to every industry. Who knows who’s next.
  - consumer451 14d ago
    What's next is capturing all of our audio and visual inputs from cradle to grave, so that we can be truly replaced. Honestly, if that happened in a 100% trusted environment, it might be cool. But, there is no money in that. Well, maybe Apple would do that? Private Cloud Compute is cool af. Still, we are far more likely fully cooked than fully trustworthy personal AI agents happening at scale.
w10-1 15d ago
> You wont want or need associate attorneys In commercial law, the business model is to rent the associates out to clients at rates higher than you pay (d/t your supervision). No client will pay $350/hour for your AI. And for direct billing, it's not your interest to do things faster for the client (at risk of making a mistake). So the real question is whether these pay-by-the-hour models will die as a result of competition from fixed-price transactions made viable via automation. I think not because the entire difficulty of legal work is that it's a complex bundle of issues until you sort them out; once sorted, there's really little to do other than execute (read: paralegals).

rayiner 15d ago

I'd love to get your thoughts on the current frontier models for law, or a link to anything you've written on the subject. Where do you think they're at?

dprkh 15d ago

LLMs will never replace human experts.

calvinmorrison 15d ago
LLMs are replacing human experts
- dprkh 15d ago
  in cases where the quality of the output doesn't matter
  - dimitri-vs 15d ago
    Many people have very low quality thresholds
    - dprkh 15d ago
      Then hopefully at some point they get to experience the consequences of having low quality thresholds, and perhaps then their quality thresholds will increase.
      - sbarre 15d ago
        This is a weirdly reductive take. There are plenty of areas where a "low bar" is more than enough. "low" doesn't necessarily mean bad here, it can simply mean "not the best". I would argue the majority (in the true sense of the word) of white-collar service work does not require an expert. It requires someone who has reasonable qualifications in the given field, and the motivation ($) to help you with your task. So no one needs a top-shelf $900/hour lawyer to draw up a basic low-stakes contract where both parties agree to all the terms as written. You just need someone to ensure that the contract is legally valid as written.
        dprkh 15d ago

thelastgallon 15d ago

Can AI replace divorce lawyers? Marriage has no friction, but divorce is high friction. Made impossibly expensive and time consuming because of the cartel of divorce industry.

ghshephard 15d ago
AI will likely replace divorce lawyers (or, at least make existing divorce lawyers much more efficient) - for non-contested divorces that are amicable. Roughly 95% of what a divorce lawyer does in that context is entirely automatable.
- byzantinegene 15d ago
  amicable divorces are like 5% of all divorces, so there's not much to be won there
  - Aramgutang 15d ago
    You may have misread that statistic, it's exactly the opposite: around 5% divorces are not resolved amicably and proceed to be litigated in court.
- mountainb 14d ago
  A template document and some software already does it without an LLM. Advising the clients on what it means and what they have to do is unfortunately something AI assistants are bad at. But this use case is not an expensive use case for family lawyers; court systems already try to make this type of settlement accessible to pro se people.
rayiner 15d ago
There are hundreds if not thousands of divorce lawyers. How is it a “cartel?” Divorce is expensive because divorces are acrimonious and people in that situation would rather spend the assets fucking each other over than letting the other person get them.

tiahura 15d ago

Personal injury attorney. AI is entrenched of every single phase of litigation, from the busywork of getting records, research, developing case theory and themes, expert selection, expert collaboration, negotiating, drafting demands, drafting pleadings, drafting discovery, drafting discovery responses, deposition prep, motion practice, jury selection, voir dire, opening statements, witness direct outlines, witness cross outlines, closing statements, and appeals.

DannyBee 15d ago
Yeah, this matches my friends - they use LLM's for tons of things, using Eve and such. But nobody is replacing the lawyers themselves in cases of any value. I also have friends in the world of high-volume personal injury (IE the morgan and morgan's of the world) but they also aren't being replaced by LLMs so far.
- fittingopposite 15d ago
  Emphasis on "so far"
  - enraged_camel 14d ago
    Yeah. Let's not forget that just a year ago, those of us in tech could not conceive of developers getting replaced by AI. Things have come so far since then however that there are multiple studies showing junior developer hiring has slowed down to a crawl.

robomartin 15d ago

One of the things I've been noticing are lawyers getting annoyed when they realized you spent time working a matter with an LLM. In the cases I've seen, it had nothing to do with the quality of what came out of the LLM. It seems to be related to --and this is only my perspective-- a reality where now reasonably intelligent/experienced clients are coming to them with a case fairly well digested, whereas before they would have to pay the law firm tens of thousands of dollars to ingest documentation and information and do the digestion. In a couple of instances I've come to the table better informed about the relevant law and case history than the attorneys were. In many ways I think this is a matter of people understanding that none of us are infinite human databases, so you can't know everything. Instead of rejecting LLMs (perhaps being passive-aggressive), they should embrace them as well as better-informed clients. Having used LLMs for software development I know full well just how terrible they can be if you don't know what you are doing, don't guide the work correctly, etc. So I am not taking legal LLM analysis as ground truth, but it isn't garbage either.

eqmvii 14d ago

I think this is key. Lawyers make a lot of money for being experts on the sidelines of disputes with values greatly in excess of their fees. They were never paid for their busy work.

sloob 14d ago

Worked for years for personal injury lawyers as an assistant/clerk. Work as a programmer now, tho. I agree that a LLM cannot do a lawyer's job on its own. Especially a trial lawyer's - which involves appearance and performance in a court room. But LLMs are having a massive impact on anything involving digestion of documents (medical records, pleadings, briefs, blah blah) and creation of documents (demand letters, pleadings, correspondence, etc etc) - like 90% of the work. What's happening is very similar to software engineering - the ladder is getting pulled up for entry level and paralegal work.

aswegs8 14d ago

What do you think about patent law?

iw2rmb 12d ago

"highly unlikely" as in "it's expensive because expected to be executed by professionals" happens already. https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/deloitte-ai-australia-government-report-hallucinations-technology-290000-refund/ https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/deloitte-ai-australia-governm... Regulation always lags.