It's even worse with some physicians. When I got an MRI a year or two ago, getting an AI diagnosis cost extra. I am very positive about AI, but I can understand why people would be hesitant to pay extra when they hear about false positives and the unreliability of AI.
Are there even any FDA labeled AI diagnostics for MRI? Just about everything I've seen is more things that are meant to help radiologists do things faster (and it's rather debatable whether they ultimately achieve that). The things I've seen gaining traction are very specific measurements (that are not themselves diagnostic) or things that improve workflow.
New analysis from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) finds that hospital systems are increasingly billing patient hospital stays as more medically complex, driving nearly $1 billion in additional healthcare costs in just two years. [...]
More than 60% of hospital systems are now using AI-enabled technologies that can scan lab results and electronic records to identify secondary diagnoses, which could move a patient into a higher-severity, higher-reimbursement billing category.
That…doesn’t sound like a bad thing for patients? That sounds like an increase in the standard of care. I’m not surprised a health insurer is mad about it though
Adding false secondary diagnoses is one of the most prevalent forms of healthcare upcoding and makes hospitals and health providers a boatload of money.
It sounds like AI is making doing that a lot easier, and probably hard to contest what it finds without running extra tests.
Upcoding is a tale as old as time (and one of UHG's main tactics for making truckloads of money), but this does seem new and interesting.
Like, obviously only a doctor can diagnose. But, they can use technology to help them look at problems, including AI (literally the most versatile pattern matching software we have, just in natural language and with lower success rates). And they can make their own judgement call on if what the tool output is saying is correct.
However, if a Doctor were to see a bogus secondary diagnosis on their screen, and then dismiss it, they're opening themself up to medical malpractice liability, no? Like, it seems like the safest option would be to run (and bill for) the extra tests to confirm if the AI's story is true or untrue.
Setting aside the unreliability of AI, healthcare is already expensive and confusing. It's hard to know what's covered or not ahead of time and it sucks to feel nickel and dimed on something that is already so expensive, especially when you consider we are not trained medical professionals, so we can't really have an informed opinion on what this is really worth...
Always ask for your imaging data. I have never been denied it. Then take that and run it through your own analysis. Years ago I had some lab work done looking for a specific genetic marker that could explain something. While that was running I took my 23andme genome and cross referenced it with snpedia and had my answer (didn't have the marker) before my doctor did. She was blown away. This was 10 years ago. I'm guessing things have improved quite a bit.
I'm sure many law companies have a trillion spare to invest in data centres. I don't think anyone would be upset if AI broke the standard charges for lawyer fees.
The issue is that communications with A.I. are not privileged like client-attorney. There was some judge that made that ruling.
Feels like a conflict of interests to me, I'd guess friends, neighbors, children and nieces of that judge enjoying their livelihood by charging for legal services. While legal services are now available under substantially lower rates and with a lot fewer conflicts of interests from A.I. providers...
But, if you were to represent yourself, are your journal entries about said case privileged? Can the opposition call into evidence a binder of legal strategies you created that morning before court?
At what point does it become a 5th amendment issue? Maybe when we get AI in our corneas a la Black Mirror's The Entire History of You?
This is a completely straightforward application of existing law on privilege. To maintain privilege, among other things, communications must be confidential.
Chatting with Claude breaks confidentiality: chats with Claude are subject to arbitrary inspection by Anthropic employees, not to mention the issue of model training.
You can use self-hosted LLMs without breaking privilege. And funny enough, law firms like Latham & Watkins are now buying Nvidia GPU clusters for this purpose.
Email and phone calls are considered confidential, even though it is possible for vendors to inspect the communication. I expect AI use will be tested legally, but once precedence has been established in court it will become a common practice.
Email and phone calls are considered confidential, even though it is possible for vendors to inspect the communication.
It's a weak analogy. Ordinary comms infrastructure providers actually have pretty robust policies, technical, and contractual measures in place that restrict employee access to customer communications. In contrast, in the wild west of generative AI, companies actively monitor session data for the content itself, in order to exploit it for their own business purposes. There is zero expectation of privacy.
So I don't share your expectation that precedent will uphold the use of consumer-tier services (in their current form) for handling privileged material.
So… if AI is reducing time taken for billable actions, then that reduces the cost no? Unless it’s not actually reducing the time spent on said actions.
My experience with lawyers is that if you need a legal document, they often have templates ready to go and will take 10 seconds to find & replace your company name into the document. I know this because they often don’t proofread it afterwards. They then charge you $1000 for that 10 seconds of work. Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.
The business plan of any "disruption" is to undercut the legacy competitors, drive them out of business, then jack up the prices. See also: Uber, streaming services.
In principle, that's fine, but "disruptive" businesses aren't building a positive long-term model. Rather, they are leveraging investors' money to recklessly demolish established systems and replace them with something worse.
Yes, lawyers have ethical and legal responsibility for their work. Plus, I'd prefer that my money not go towards the consolidation and monopolization of all intellectual labor in the hands of Sam Altman.
I think this concern is not really reasonable given that there are a vast array of LLMs, now including completely open weight frontier tier models. The valuations of certain companies is nothing but a bubble. What logic exists for it is probably in one part praying for a government granted monopoly, and in part relying on the LLM companies being deemed too big to fail when the bubble bursts. The latter part is also probably true, and a yet another good reason that too big to fail is the dumbest logic ever - rather than protecting the economy, it directly drives self destructive behavior.
You pay the human because you assume they take responsibility in this being correct. If they literally copy-paste without checking they are no better than AI. In fact they may be worse.
Lawyer jokes are on point and on brand for a reason.
They grift about as hard as tech workers did pre-2022. Relying on the fact that no one can easily audit their work to justify their one hour of actually work despite making easily 300K+ a year.
Please kill their golden goose. Most lawyers are actively harmful to society.
They grift about as hard as tech workers did pre-2022. Relying on the fact that no one can easily audit their work to justify their one hour of actually work despite making easily 300K+ a year.
The law works because most people won't break it, most disputes don't even end up in anyone getting sued, and most lawsuits end up in settlements before too much court time was spent. Break any of those things, and systems crack. Break multiple, and it all collapses.
If the cost of what a lawyer does today drops to pennies, the system probably needs robo-judges, and/or massive penalties for taking something in front of a human judge when the facts sufficiently completely one sided, as making them pay the winning party's legal fees will become insufficient deterrence.
That is self inflicted by having a system where you're expected to plead not guilty when you're guilty, because otherwise you get screwed. In other country's legal systems, pleading not guilty when ultimately found guilty is taken as a lack of remorse and tends to result in harsh sentencing. By contrast if somebody pleads guilty, shows remorse, and works with the police and others then they can expect to receive relatively lenient sentencing, all other things being equal.
I see no evidence that in our nation's 250 year history or the broader practice of law (specifically adversarial law), that lawyers are working to make their job more efficient, legal outcomes more reliable, or legal tools more accessible.
Burn their entire industry to the ground. I welcome making the practice of law an AI-only field and ban humans from working in it to remove prejudice, misconduct, expense. As a former foster parent, I've seen children being delayed justice for weeks because two lawyers couldn't find time for a 15 minute conversation in front a judge. I've hated all lawyers ever since. Gatekeeping priesthood of the 21st century.
The priesthood metaphor works quite well as well since everything they touch ends up in a fashion that may as well have been written in Latin. And it's all wholly unnecessary since, contrary to the common perception of law operating on esoteric interpretations of a comma, lots of things in law come down to reasonable discretion. Of course exercising that reasonable discretion oneself requires first decrypting the text, which is outside the bounds of most laymen. So lawyers get paid lots of money to decipher texts that lawyers were paid lots of money to encipher using a legal system composed by politicians who were themselves, overwhelmingly, lawyers as well.
I recently had a similar experience where it became very clear that the lawyers were using AI to draft the agreements. Though it was very accurate and pedantic on some matters, it got other things completely wrong because it was not provided with full context, and full context is very difficult to provide.
The lawyers did not properly review the agreements, causing post-signature discovery of major issues and having to redo and execute all the agreements a second time, leading to inflated lawyer bills.
If the lawyer is going to prompt the same AI that I can prompt myself and is not going to review the agreements thoroughly, then it is clear where this is leading.
I think it is more akin to paying a software contractor to make something to meet your specific need, and they give you an off the shelf product (which they may or may not have made themselves).
The difference is that lawyers typically charge by the hour. Software is not sold based on how long it took to create.
So, if a lawyer bills $1000 for "10 seconds of work", it smells fraudulent.
If $1000 was a flat rate, then it's similar to software: you're purchasing some IP and passing off legal liability to the lawyer. How long the lawyer spent on it doesn't matter.
The fee agreement was an hourly rate for producing a legal document. The resulting document looks like it took 10 seconds to produce. The lawyer billed $1000 worth of hours.
So, either the document was much more complex than anticipated (in which case the lawyer should have said so), or the lawyer inflated the hours.
I know this because they often don’t proofread it afterwards.
It’s hilarious to see people complaining about lawyers being overpaid and incompetent on a forum dedicated to an industry that was completely unregulated up until about a month ago. A lawyer can be disbarred from his profession for making these kinds of mistakes; can you?
> They then charge you $1000 for that 10 seconds of work. Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.
Ahh, the salaryman lament against contract workers (plumbers, car mechanics, lawyers etc): he makes $25/hour, why don't they charge similar or less?
Because unlike you, who get a steady stream of money even if only sitting on your ass, these people only make a living if someone calls them and asks a job done. If lawyers would charge per effective time spent as much as you would deem negligible on your side, they'd have to work a construction worker job to make a living and do lawyering on the side./
A plumber comes over to repair a broken water heater. He looks at it, taps a pipe with his wrench, and it's fixed. He hands the customer a bill for $500. The customer becomes angry because all the plumber did was tap a pipe, and demands to see an itemized bill.
They can fill random document as well, it’s their expertise which template to use that fills your scenario and additionally once it gets to subtle nuances, you don’t want to do those yourself either.
The lawyer I ended up using for a lot of my structuring happily admitted as much when I was shopping around for someone to do what I needed. I said something along the lines of "all the other quotes I've got are obviously more expensive, I have to think that's because they've put a lot more work into them to cover/mitigate any precedent I need to be concerned with and/or are better equipped defend these documents if we end up in court". His reply was: "Oh sweet summer child! You think any of us are showing up in court to defend these contracts!? No. If someone has issues with any of these, you'll send them to me and I'll charge you my rate to deal with them. If we need use a clause in these contracts to protect ourselves or get what we're owed then I'll send a bunch of stern emails about it, and I'll charge you my rate. But if anything ever ends up in court... hah... that's not us man. Now you're having to find a lawyer that specialises in litigation. Nobody that you're speaking to about these documents right now is going to show up in court to defend these documents. That's not how it works".
When I pushed the others it turns out he was right (except for one especially large firm who basically did everything, but it may as well have been a collection of a dozen different companies). Really appreciated his honesty but was all the more baffled by how the whole industry hadn't already been disrupted.
I feel this is the case for a lot of industries (and even a lot of productivity-enhancers, beyond AI).
I remember a much slower change where software slowly ate away the work of property managers. Especially convenient was the ability for the tenant to perform the 6-monthly inspection remotely by uploading a half-dozen photos per room, taking just 15 minutes or so rather than waiting around for several hours for a physical meet up with the property manager. Software also allowed rent payments to be easily automated, collated and monitored.
But I don't think the number of property managers decreased, nor the price that landlords paid for their services.
When I was looking for an apartment recently, the big "luxury" buildings use AI agents to schedule tours and answer questions. Tours are also self-serve, you don't actually get to meet and talk to anyone. It's a crappy experience. I had to call an AI agent to figure out how to get in the front door of a building and it completely failed to answer this very basic question (fortunately someone eventually saw me knocking). When I toured one large complex there were several groups wandering through the building at once. It did not give me a particularly safe feeling to see that random people going everywhere in the buildings unescorted had been completely normalized.
I know almost nothing about law firms. But for some other industry if you have 1000 competitors making similar products then companies will compete on price. If you reduce your prices then you will probably get more customers.
If you want to buy a new PC would you rather just have IBM making PCs and setting the price to whatever they want or a thousand different clone companies all competing on price, features, support, etc?
So some new law firm may want to disrupt the industry with a new model
Spoke with a banker at a well known investment bank in NYC last week. They told the law firm they want the fees cut in half or they walk. This is to a top 5 law firm. Lawyers are trying to charge the same prices, when both sides know they are working half the hours. This is even at the most premium top end, where an engagement bill can run up to 30 million.
One thing you get from legal council is they'll be ready to defend and contracts or agreements they've made for you. Might be hard to find defense or offense on AI slop contracts. We've seen how AI does code, imagine that inconsistency in legal docs.
Outside of court proceedings, a significant proportion of what law offices do is already extremely streamlined. Stuff like wills, deeds, incorporation paperwork, is all template-based and any remaining work is done by paralegals, then billed at outrageous rates. So I'm not actually sure if AI makes it a whole lot cheaper. Maybe it makes it harder to pretend.
But there's also a good reason why lawyers can keep charging these fees: because they have a say on who can practice the profession. Unlike software engineers and like doctors, they're in charge and will not allow autonomous systems to represent you or otherwise "practice law". That'd be suicide.
Also, for many services, downward price pressure already exists to some extent, in that there are various "low-stakes" virtual legal firms licensed in multiple states that provide forms you can fill and then file for $50 a pop instead of $500 a pop. But most consumers still prefer to visit a local law office. I'm not sure this will change with AI. I know quite a few people who are keen to self-diagnose using Google or ChatGPT, but I don't know as many inclined to vibecode their articles of incorporation.
It's really one of these white-collar professions that I think is quite secure. Software engineers are hosed to a greater extent, having enthusiastically engineered their own personal hell.
My partner spent many years in big law and now sits across the table on the client side. The billable hour has been problematic for much longer than AI has been in the picture, but what many people forget (including sometimes the companies paying the bill) is that you often aren't really paying for the hours, you're paying the structural tax that has been established by the system. Hours imply work product, but sometimes the reason firms are paying outside counsel _at all_ isn't because their in-house team couldn't do it, it's because the market/courts have told them they need the liability transference granted by a signed piece of paper.
That said, the rest of the article is on point. AI billing analysis software + internal knowledge of how the sausage gets made has shaved literal millions off bills at this point. I wouldn't expect them to lose money in an absolute sense though. More like a balloon you squeeze from one end.
One thing I came here to say, but turn out not to be the case, was the large jump in associates salaries as an interesting possible driver. I found a handy tracking number that does inflation adjustment. Turns out when you index for inflation, the associate pay scales are more or less flat.
I think that question is very similar to why, if AI is making software developers so much more productive, those developers are not getting paid substantially more, or having to work fewer hours.
Not the same thing because you are talking about employees, not customers. The way a corporation sees it is that it means they need less developers for the same (or more) delivery. And then it should mean a market more in their favor, so actually lower wages
Subscriptions do seem to continue to go _up_, too. The proof of the productivity pudding is lower prices, which means the proof of all this AI hype is not so much Millennium Prizes being solved than subscriptions actually getting cheaper. If AI is already having a huge effect, inflation should be going down... if AI will have the effects OpenAI et al are currently selling, prices should plumet. I mean, I'm waiting...
Can’t recall where I read it, but there was an interesting post about how AI was being received by the legal industry. There were largely two camps, those who got it and knew they must adopt and adapt, and those who got it but were like “why should I adopt something that directly reduces my billable hours?” It seemed pretty clear that the latter camp was not going to exist much longer. I guess this is playing out as expected.
Think about the adversaries using LLMs to generate ever-increasing preponderous walls of text that are mostly sycophantic and subtly legally blonde. If every adversary to my law firm generates 250% more text than before, our billable hours will balloon accordingly to the time it takes junior partners to read it all, digest it, redact, whatever. In fact, speaking of redacting, perhaps billable hours increase as you proofread your own LLM output. Regardless, LLMs should empower even criminal defendants to become quasi-eloquent and "type" 1,000wpm. It would seem that "reduces billable hours" is a naïve and premature prediction.
I mean AI was being sold to law firms as a tool to automate the drudge work that takes the most time and hence contributes most to the billable hours. That is what they were reacting to. I’m not sure I follow the adversarial model here?
It's even worse with some physicians. When I got an MRI a year or two ago, getting an AI diagnosis cost extra. I am very positive about AI, but I can understand why people would be hesitant to pay extra when they hear about false positives and the unreliability of AI.
Yep one imaging center in LA is charging $45 out of pocket for the AI diagnosis.
can you say no to an AI diagnosis in that case?
Yes, sorry should have mentioned that. Of course the easy solution is then to simply decline.
Are there even any FDA labeled AI diagnostics for MRI? Just about everything I've seen is more things that are meant to help radiologists do things faster (and it's rather debatable whether they ultimately achieve that). The things I've seen gaining traction are very specific measurements (that are not themselves diagnostic) or things that improve workflow.
Additionally, BCBS reports that hospitals are using AI to find ways to charge more money: https://www.bcbs.com/about-us/association-news/bcbsa-analysi...
That…doesn’t sound like a bad thing for patients? That sounds like an increase in the standard of care. I’m not surprised a health insurer is mad about it though
Adding false secondary diagnoses is one of the most prevalent forms of healthcare upcoding and makes hospitals and health providers a boatload of money.
It sounds like AI is making doing that a lot easier, and probably hard to contest what it finds without running extra tests.
Upcoding is a tale as old as time (and one of UHG's main tactics for making truckloads of money), but this does seem new and interesting.
Like, obviously only a doctor can diagnose. But, they can use technology to help them look at problems, including AI (literally the most versatile pattern matching software we have, just in natural language and with lower success rates). And they can make their own judgement call on if what the tool output is saying is correct.
However, if a Doctor were to see a bogus secondary diagnosis on their screen, and then dismiss it, they're opening themself up to medical malpractice liability, no? Like, it seems like the safest option would be to run (and bill for) the extra tests to confirm if the AI's story is true or untrue.
Setting aside the unreliability of AI, healthcare is already expensive and confusing. It's hard to know what's covered or not ahead of time and it sucks to feel nickel and dimed on something that is already so expensive, especially when you consider we are not trained medical professionals, so we can't really have an informed opinion on what this is really worth...
Always ask for your imaging data. I have never been denied it. Then take that and run it through your own analysis. Years ago I had some lab work done looking for a specific genetic marker that could explain something. While that was running I took my 23andme genome and cross referenced it with snpedia and had my answer (didn't have the marker) before my doctor did. She was blown away. This was 10 years ago. I'm guessing things have improved quite a bit.
Well we’ve spent over a trillion on infrastructure and we’re only just getting started so good luck getting your fucking discount
I'm sure many law companies have a trillion spare to invest in data centres. I don't think anyone would be upset if AI broke the standard charges for lawyer fees.
I’m just waiting for the AI judgments, followed by the flash trials, followed by the flash litigation DDOS attacks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL2RLTmqG4w
Australia already has AI tax judgements:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
https://archive.is/dmUuD
The issue is that communications with A.I. are not privileged like client-attorney. There was some judge that made that ruling.
Feels like a conflict of interests to me, I'd guess friends, neighbors, children and nieces of that judge enjoying their livelihood by charging for legal services. While legal services are now available under substantially lower rates and with a lot fewer conflicts of interests from A.I. providers...
They ruled that it's like a journal, or a tool like a search engine. This seems fair.
But, if you were to represent yourself, are your journal entries about said case privileged? Can the opposition call into evidence a binder of legal strategies you created that morning before court?
At what point does it become a 5th amendment issue? Maybe when we get AI in our corneas a la Black Mirror's The Entire History of You?
This is a completely straightforward application of existing law on privilege. To maintain privilege, among other things, communications must be confidential.
Chatting with Claude breaks confidentiality: chats with Claude are subject to arbitrary inspection by Anthropic employees, not to mention the issue of model training.
You can use self-hosted LLMs without breaking privilege. And funny enough, law firms like Latham & Watkins are now buying Nvidia GPU clusters for this purpose.
Email and phone calls are considered confidential, even though it is possible for vendors to inspect the communication. I expect AI use will be tested legally, but once precedence has been established in court it will become a common practice.
It's a weak analogy. Ordinary comms infrastructure providers actually have pretty robust policies, technical, and contractual measures in place that restrict employee access to customer communications. In contrast, in the wild west of generative AI, companies actively monitor session data for the content itself, in order to exploit it for their own business purposes. There is zero expectation of privacy.
So I don't share your expectation that precedent will uphold the use of consumer-tier services (in their current form) for handling privileged material.
That's basically like devs being 10x with AI - they ain't getting a raise for that..
So… if AI is reducing time taken for billable actions, then that reduces the cost no? Unless it’s not actually reducing the time spent on said actions.
Reduces the cost to the medical provider. You think that'll result in a reduced the cost on the person's bill?
My experience with lawyers is that if you need a legal document, they often have templates ready to go and will take 10 seconds to find & replace your company name into the document. I know this because they often don’t proofread it afterwards. They then charge you $1000 for that 10 seconds of work. Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.
Because you'd rather pay your $1000 to OpenAI for 5 milliseconds of work, instead of to a human lawyer for 10 seconds of work?
Except you probably pay cents in tokens for that, or included with your sub.
The business plan of any "disruption" is to undercut the legacy competitors, drive them out of business, then jack up the prices. See also: Uber, streaming services.
Enjoy your cheap lawyer tokens while you can.
I mean that's just how life is? Exploit opportunities when they appear, find new ones when they run out.
In principle, that's fine, but "disruptive" businesses aren't building a positive long-term model. Rather, they are leveraging investors' money to recklessly demolish established systems and replace them with something worse.
If the human lawyer doesn’t proofread it, whats the point’s the point of a human lawyer? Scapegoat for the AI?
Yes, lawyers have ethical and legal responsibility for their work. Plus, I'd prefer that my money not go towards the consolidation and monopolization of all intellectual labor in the hands of Sam Altman.
I think this concern is not really reasonable given that there are a vast array of LLMs, now including completely open weight frontier tier models. The valuations of certain companies is nothing but a bubble. What logic exists for it is probably in one part praying for a government granted monopoly, and in part relying on the LLM companies being deemed too big to fail when the bubble bursts. The latter part is also probably true, and a yet another good reason that too big to fail is the dumbest logic ever - rather than protecting the economy, it directly drives self destructive behavior.
You pay the human because you assume they take responsibility in this being correct. If they literally copy-paste without checking they are no better than AI. In fact they may be worse.
My comment was not intended to express support of using AI instead of lawyers, but rather to express the pointlessness of "disrupting" human lawyers.
Weird take on a site with most of us coasting on a near zero marginal cost product.
You develop software for your second client in 10 seconds?
Each additional copy? Only if it's really, really big. Otherwise it's under 2 seconds.
Your SaaS web app takes more than 10 seconds to render in your client's web browser?
Lawyer jokes are on point and on brand for a reason.
They grift about as hard as tech workers did pre-2022. Relying on the fact that no one can easily audit their work to justify their one hour of actually work despite making easily 300K+ a year.
Please kill their golden goose. Most lawyers are actively harmful to society.
This isn’t true at all.
On the other hand, I'm horrified at the thought of zero marginal cost legal work given the strain of the current workload on courts.
Maybe courts could be replaced by AI too once it's good enough?
With the right to escalate to human judges of course.
and without turning it into current phone helplines or support chatbots, god please.
How often are you satisfied with the answers from the customer service chatbot vs immediately looking for the talk to a human button?
The law works because most people won't break it, most disputes don't even end up in anyone getting sued, and most lawsuits end up in settlements before too much court time was spent. Break any of those things, and systems crack. Break multiple, and it all collapses.
If the cost of what a lawyer does today drops to pennies, the system probably needs robo-judges, and/or massive penalties for taking something in front of a human judge when the facts sufficiently completely one sided, as making them pay the winning party's legal fees will become insufficient deterrence.
That is self inflicted by having a system where you're expected to plead not guilty when you're guilty, because otherwise you get screwed. In other country's legal systems, pleading not guilty when ultimately found guilty is taken as a lack of remorse and tends to result in harsh sentencing. By contrast if somebody pleads guilty, shows remorse, and works with the police and others then they can expect to receive relatively lenient sentencing, all other things being equal.
I see no evidence that in our nation's 250 year history or the broader practice of law (specifically adversarial law), that lawyers are working to make their job more efficient, legal outcomes more reliable, or legal tools more accessible.
Burn their entire industry to the ground. I welcome making the practice of law an AI-only field and ban humans from working in it to remove prejudice, misconduct, expense. As a former foster parent, I've seen children being delayed justice for weeks because two lawyers couldn't find time for a 15 minute conversation in front a judge. I've hated all lawyers ever since. Gatekeeping priesthood of the 21st century.
The priesthood metaphor works quite well as well since everything they touch ends up in a fashion that may as well have been written in Latin. And it's all wholly unnecessary since, contrary to the common perception of law operating on esoteric interpretations of a comma, lots of things in law come down to reasonable discretion. Of course exercising that reasonable discretion oneself requires first decrypting the text, which is outside the bounds of most laymen. So lawyers get paid lots of money to decipher texts that lawyers were paid lots of money to encipher using a legal system composed by politicians who were themselves, overwhelmingly, lawyers as well.
Dante's 8th Circle indeed.
I recently had a similar experience where it became very clear that the lawyers were using AI to draft the agreements. Though it was very accurate and pedantic on some matters, it got other things completely wrong because it was not provided with full context, and full context is very difficult to provide.
The lawyers did not properly review the agreements, causing post-signature discovery of major issues and having to redo and execute all the agreements a second time, leading to inflated lawyer bills.
If the lawyer is going to prompt the same AI that I can prompt myself and is not going to review the agreements thoroughly, then it is clear where this is leading.
Do you have any issues with thr tech industry selling software licenses?
Because a lawyer selling a contract template, is in many ways, very similar in concept to tech industry selling a software license/seat.
They are both akin to “templates”, and selling IP.
One is transparent and the other feels like a lie.
Not in principle, but in practice.
They still need to proofread the doc and make sure it applies to their client though?
I think it is more akin to paying a software contractor to make something to meet your specific need, and they give you an off the shelf product (which they may or may not have made themselves).
The difference is that lawyers typically charge by the hour. Software is not sold based on how long it took to create.
So, if a lawyer bills $1000 for "10 seconds of work", it smells fraudulent.
If $1000 was a flat rate, then it's similar to software: you're purchasing some IP and passing off legal liability to the lawyer. How long the lawyer spent on it doesn't matter.
Why would it be fraudulent if the fee agreement disclosed it?
I understood the OP's point as follows:
The fee agreement was an hourly rate for producing a legal document. The resulting document looks like it took 10 seconds to produce. The lawyer billed $1000 worth of hours.
So, either the document was much more complex than anticipated (in which case the lawyer should have said so), or the lawyer inflated the hours.
It’s hilarious to see people complaining about lawyers being overpaid and incompetent on a forum dedicated to an industry that was completely unregulated up until about a month ago. A lawyer can be disbarred from his profession for making these kinds of mistakes; can you?
did i miss something? are developers regulated since last month?
Not really fair comparison. I agree they are ripping us, but the "template" is like a source code. It takes time and money to write and maintain it.
Ahh, the salaryman lament against contract workers (plumbers, car mechanics, lawyers etc): he makes $25/hour, why don't they charge similar or less?
Because unlike you, who get a steady stream of money even if only sitting on your ass, these people only make a living if someone calls them and asks a job done. If lawyers would charge per effective time spent as much as you would deem negligible on your side, they'd have to work a construction worker job to make a living and do lawyering on the side./
This reminds me of the parable about the plumber.
A plumber comes over to repair a broken water heater. He looks at it, taps a pipe with his wrench, and it's fixed. He hands the customer a bill for $500. The customer becomes angry because all the plumber did was tap a pipe, and demands to see an itemized bill.
The plumber dutifully provides the bill:
* Pipe tapping: $5
* Knowing where to tap: $495
Except in this analogy the plumber didn't know where to tap, or knew and didn't care enough to tap in the right place.
I can tap a pipe in a random spot for a lot less than $500.
They can fill random document as well, it’s their expertise which template to use that fills your scenario and additionally once it gets to subtle nuances, you don’t want to do those yourself either.
The lawyer I ended up using for a lot of my structuring happily admitted as much when I was shopping around for someone to do what I needed. I said something along the lines of "all the other quotes I've got are obviously more expensive, I have to think that's because they've put a lot more work into them to cover/mitigate any precedent I need to be concerned with and/or are better equipped defend these documents if we end up in court". His reply was: "Oh sweet summer child! You think any of us are showing up in court to defend these contracts!? No. If someone has issues with any of these, you'll send them to me and I'll charge you my rate to deal with them. If we need use a clause in these contracts to protect ourselves or get what we're owed then I'll send a bunch of stern emails about it, and I'll charge you my rate. But if anything ever ends up in court... hah... that's not us man. Now you're having to find a lawyer that specialises in litigation. Nobody that you're speaking to about these documents right now is going to show up in court to defend these documents. That's not how it works".
When I pushed the others it turns out he was right (except for one especially large firm who basically did everything, but it may as well have been a collection of a dozen different companies). Really appreciated his honesty but was all the more baffled by how the whole industry hadn't already been disrupted.
Law firms are going to be rolled over by AI. The inefficient law firms will be replaced. Like Expedia, etc. did to travel agents.
I feel this is the case for a lot of industries (and even a lot of productivity-enhancers, beyond AI).
I remember a much slower change where software slowly ate away the work of property managers. Especially convenient was the ability for the tenant to perform the 6-monthly inspection remotely by uploading a half-dozen photos per room, taking just 15 minutes or so rather than waiting around for several hours for a physical meet up with the property manager. Software also allowed rent payments to be easily automated, collated and monitored.
But I don't think the number of property managers decreased, nor the price that landlords paid for their services.
When I was looking for an apartment recently, the big "luxury" buildings use AI agents to schedule tours and answer questions. Tours are also self-serve, you don't actually get to meet and talk to anyone. It's a crappy experience. I had to call an AI agent to figure out how to get in the front door of a building and it completely failed to answer this very basic question (fortunately someone eventually saw me knocking). When I toured one large complex there were several groups wandering through the building at once. It did not give me a particularly safe feeling to see that random people going everywhere in the buildings unescorted had been completely normalized.
AI is just a tool like everything else. Are you also going to ask me for a discount because I used a powered screw driver?
Yes, because I'm expecting you to compete.
Exactly, somebody using power tools can do a lot more in an hour than somebody using manual tools. That is the real discount.
and conversely, I'll pay you more if you grab a rake and not a leaf blower
since we're posting pointless gotchas:
Do we pay more to a lawyer if they handwrite a legal document using expert penmanship?
I know almost nothing about law firms. But for some other industry if you have 1000 competitors making similar products then companies will compete on price. If you reduce your prices then you will probably get more customers.
If you want to buy a new PC would you rather just have IBM making PCs and setting the price to whatever they want or a thousand different clone companies all competing on price, features, support, etc?
So some new law firm may want to disrupt the industry with a new model
Spoke with a banker at a well known investment bank in NYC last week. They told the law firm they want the fees cut in half or they walk. This is to a top 5 law firm. Lawyers are trying to charge the same prices, when both sides know they are working half the hours. This is even at the most premium top end, where an engagement bill can run up to 30 million.
An absurd claim presented without evidence.
Aren't bankers charging the same prices they were _before computerization_?
One thing you get from legal council is they'll be ready to defend and contracts or agreements they've made for you. Might be hard to find defense or offense on AI slop contracts. We've seen how AI does code, imagine that inconsistency in legal docs.
Outside of court proceedings, a significant proportion of what law offices do is already extremely streamlined. Stuff like wills, deeds, incorporation paperwork, is all template-based and any remaining work is done by paralegals, then billed at outrageous rates. So I'm not actually sure if AI makes it a whole lot cheaper. Maybe it makes it harder to pretend.
But there's also a good reason why lawyers can keep charging these fees: because they have a say on who can practice the profession. Unlike software engineers and like doctors, they're in charge and will not allow autonomous systems to represent you or otherwise "practice law". That'd be suicide.
Also, for many services, downward price pressure already exists to some extent, in that there are various "low-stakes" virtual legal firms licensed in multiple states that provide forms you can fill and then file for $50 a pop instead of $500 a pop. But most consumers still prefer to visit a local law office. I'm not sure this will change with AI. I know quite a few people who are keen to self-diagnose using Google or ChatGPT, but I don't know as many inclined to vibecode their articles of incorporation.
It's really one of these white-collar professions that I think is quite secure. Software engineers are hosed to a greater extent, having enthusiastically engineered their own personal hell.
And yet many software developers are hyping themselves into obsolescence by pretending you can't write code by hand anymore.
Lawyers and politicians are the first things that ought to be replaced by AI, honestly.
Remember that it can always get worse.
We've watched Terminator and The Matrix. We're ready
My partner spent many years in big law and now sits across the table on the client side. The billable hour has been problematic for much longer than AI has been in the picture, but what many people forget (including sometimes the companies paying the bill) is that you often aren't really paying for the hours, you're paying the structural tax that has been established by the system. Hours imply work product, but sometimes the reason firms are paying outside counsel _at all_ isn't because their in-house team couldn't do it, it's because the market/courts have told them they need the liability transference granted by a signed piece of paper.
That said, the rest of the article is on point. AI billing analysis software + internal knowledge of how the sausage gets made has shaved literal millions off bills at this point. I wouldn't expect them to lose money in an absolute sense though. More like a balloon you squeeze from one end.
One thing I came here to say, but turn out not to be the case, was the large jump in associates salaries as an interesting possible driver. I found a handy tracking number that does inflation adjustment. Turns out when you index for inflation, the associate pay scales are more or less flat.
I think that question is very similar to why, if AI is making software developers so much more productive, those developers are not getting paid substantially more, or having to work fewer hours.
Not the same thing because you are talking about employees, not customers. The way a corporation sees it is that it means they need less developers for the same (or more) delivery. And then it should mean a market more in their favor, so actually lower wages
Subscriptions do seem to continue to go _up_, too. The proof of the productivity pudding is lower prices, which means the proof of all this AI hype is not so much Millennium Prizes being solved than subscriptions actually getting cheaper. If AI is already having a huge effect, inflation should be going down... if AI will have the effects OpenAI et al are currently selling, prices should plumet. I mean, I'm waiting...
Can’t recall where I read it, but there was an interesting post about how AI was being received by the legal industry. There were largely two camps, those who got it and knew they must adopt and adapt, and those who got it but were like “why should I adopt something that directly reduces my billable hours?” It seemed pretty clear that the latter camp was not going to exist much longer. I guess this is playing out as expected.
Think about the adversaries using LLMs to generate ever-increasing preponderous walls of text that are mostly sycophantic and subtly legally blonde. If every adversary to my law firm generates 250% more text than before, our billable hours will balloon accordingly to the time it takes junior partners to read it all, digest it, redact, whatever. In fact, speaking of redacting, perhaps billable hours increase as you proofread your own LLM output. Regardless, LLMs should empower even criminal defendants to become quasi-eloquent and "type" 1,000wpm. It would seem that "reduces billable hours" is a naïve and premature prediction.
I mean AI was being sold to law firms as a tool to automate the drudge work that takes the most time and hence contributes most to the billable hours. That is what they were reacting to. I’m not sure I follow the adversarial model here?