huh? Many/most are no-fault jurisdictions with strict rules on dividing community property. Divorce is easy and cheap, unless it's hard to find assets.
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).
Corporate lawyer at big law firm here. I believe the model will be like this: we will review your 1000 agreements but with AI. AI is generally accurate but has some risks, if you agree we will charge you less. The client will agree. Instead of spending 300-400 hours to review the ageeements AI will do instantly. A lawyer will spend the time on reviewing the red flags identified and draft a report.
We already do the same with translation. Before computer translation became good (i.e pre-Deepl era), we used to translate documents (cease and desist letters, court petitions etc.) ourselves. Now we offer AI translation free of charge. If client wants reliance on the translation we charge a small bit.
Lawfirms are also under pressure for meeting internal budgets. Most clients ask for capped fees. If you charge 10k for a job to a client and the hourly costs ramp up to 20k, the management criticises the partner, the associates become unwilling to work for the partner (as their hours get written off).
So with AI law firms can bet more competitively as the cost (human attorney hours) are reduced.
But they may be willing to pay $200/hour for your AI (plus, of course, your final expertise in the matter as the lawyer), and the firm can ditch the paralegals and pocket the difference.
The point is, if you need fewer grunts doing the busywork, you can charge less and be competitive.
There's a middle area too between your options - a law firm that utilizes AI offers cheaper pricing than the current firms for the same work. Ideally competition will drive prices down but of course law doesn't have the benefit of do-overs on cases, so reputation still plays a big factor.
That's the big question, how prices evolve if LLMs increase supply. Standard economic theory says that prices must collapse. There is probably still a short time of 2-5 years where AI native firms can pocket in quite some arbitrage but I guess markets will eventually figure it out and prices will collapse.
This is not only for law. The same applies to all the other industries where LLMs can be used to automate work tasks.
I agree that prices will go down dramatically in occupations that primarily involve code, words, and numbers - and in general knowing the "rules". But there are so many occupations that will have to wait for AI to enter the physical realm. I also predict that the backlash will largely prevent that from occurring.
But they already do! There are cases of professional service firms creating their reports using LLMs, there have even been a few prominent scandals re the fake data generated in them
It is in litigation as well. The issue is that corporate clients are demanding AI. They don’t want to pay associates to do a first draft, they want senior partner to just push the ChatGPT button and then check it.
Investing used to be a resource-weighted signal of human economic projections, where resources flow to better projections. Public markets had social value for their resource allocation and signalling/coordination benefits. Now? How could they avoid hallucination contagions?
It would cause them to pivot and attempt to be better. Give a mouse a button that pleasures it's brain and it will push it until it dies. That's what the senior leadership at these companies are doing. Bribe government officials to keep the pleasure button going, to the detriment of the company and society.
Competition forces companies to stop just pressing the pleasure button and start drinking from the water again.
I wanted the author to see how this relates elsewhere and identify the forces at work.
The solution is not just "do only what's needed by the customer".
There are emerging environments where the conditions don't force previously-rational decisions, and where assumptions no longer apply. New tools in the battlefields of yore, new beliefs and practices in cultures...
The stunning march of compute hardware in the last 50 years has changed many such conditions.
Those who work with new freedom - liberated from the strictures of old gods, able to harm enemies without putting themselves at risk, with the time freed from foraging to build - have to identify the new constraints and conditions at work.
And sometimes to make the conditions that make for sanity: Solon got ancient Greece out of a stagnating pickle by getting the wealthy to release the poor from debtors' jails but sign them up for the military that could defend lands and trade routes, if they subjected themselves to land-owner self-government and the annual ostracism of one person who went too far.
Capitalism used competitive markets to liberate but discipline business, but right now the scaling power of compute leads to winner-take-all, and the openness of the West is seeding closed systems (military or foreign) with the power to destroy the liberal governance that sustains it. In software we're stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: an Anthropic+OpenAI duopoly or Chinese control over the lifeblood of enterprise.
If there were someone who in the large had structured the freedom of software to make its practitioners and stakeholders sane, they'd be a good candidate to steer us through this situation, so this freedom wouldn't drive us insane.
Most of the costs of switching have yet to be borne: user issues with untested code, maintenance issues with code few understand, and the strategic dependency on coding LLM's, which will change in character after providers go public and need revenue to fit reasonable stock multiples. All only get worse with time unless they're addressed proactively.
I'm right-handed but I always keep my phone in my left pocket and use it with my left hand (keys have always been in my right pocket). I'm also pretty curious about the answer to this.
> the best argument for AI is that it's an arms race
It's best not to reduce AI momentum to arguments, especially the "best" arguments (meaning I suppose most acceptable?).
The same forces that feed and motivate humans and that drive resource and governance decisions generally also strongly support building AI, particularly insofar as it can deliver strategic advantages in our many competitions over resources and influence. Cyber-defensive use is at best a nice side-effect, but itself might be cast aside for the sake of other advantages.
In this historical moment, due to the need to generate public interest in product, equity, and debt offerings, some of this building happens in the open. But the military-industrial complex prizes secrecy, in part to hide capabilities, but mostly to imply more capabilities than they actually have. Historically, critical innovation will get bottled up in secrecy (which not coincidentally gives them the power to choose who will gain), but frankly that market is much smaller than enterprise and consumer. So we can bet that it's not only "open models" that are targeted to go under wraps, and more broadly we should not believe that the intentions of researchers matter, but whether governments are more interested in the strategic benefits than the economic ones (or view the economic ones as net-negative for their jurisdications).
> the evolution of more efficient communication systems because it would require going through a stage where communication between signalers and receivers is perturbed
huh? Many/most are no-fault jurisdictions with strict rules on dividing community property. Divorce is easy and cheap, unless it's hard to find assets.
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