[jessriedel]

It's a common misconception that AI needs to be able to perform essentially any task a human can do to induce the "collapse" of an industry. But really, all it needs to do is make each lawyer 2x more efficient (by automating the easy-to-automate tasks) and suddenly half of all lawyers are unemployed even though every lawyer employed today does some tasks that can't be automated. That's a collapse.

[erikbern]

This assumes there's a fixed demand for legal help. You might as well envision that the efficiency gains cause a huge drop in legal costs which unlocks a huge latent demand. For instance software engineers are probably 10x more efficient now compared to 20 years ago, but this does not mean mass unemployment.

[zanny]

Software is the exception since its a new industry that is simultaneously expanding demand by orders of magnitude while automation dramatically increases the productivity of individual SEs.

There are plenty of people who were in industry and were forced out because they could not adapt to more efficient tooling to keep their jobs. Those that learned on ASM and Fortran may not be adapt for a world of prebaked containers and building everything out of node plugins that do the work. Even less are they suited to training heuristics for genetic algorithms that implement some of our most sophisticated software projects like speech recognition or vision.

By comparison at least those with money have saturated their demand for lawyers. Law is a particularly targetable field since its often considered overhead or expense.

[pzone]

"Software is the exception." If I weren't reading this on HN...

Your only argument is stating that the demand for lawyers is saturated. How is that different from saying the supply curve and the demand curve cross? This is about a shift in the supply curve. The whole point of the previous comment is that AI-assisted legal counsel will be much much cheaper than it currently is. That means people will quite likely want more of it.

[erkkie]

Software is the exception as-in it is the tool that is driving the elimination process itself. And at the same time it does lead to the same effects inside the software industry. These two things seem to be opposites but they aren't. They are different facets.

[daemin]

Akin to something that happened with accounting when computerised spreadsheets came about. Instead of killing the field it just expanded it as more people wanted advice and what-if scenarios explored.

[notahacker]

And it's ludicrously obvious how much extra potential work there is for legal contractors. Right now there are companies turning down revenue-generating opportunities because the time/cost of scrutinising proposed contract changes isn't worth it. Not to mention a huge number of agreements done on a "standard contract, no exceptions" basis for the same reasons. If automation allows these to be turned around in hours, for a fraction of the price, the variation and complexity in standard contracts is going to multiply exponentially.

Even if the process of checking the contracts is fully automated, there's still a role for an associate/paralegal level lawyer (overseeing many more contracts than their predecessors) to answer followup questions, because their clients aren't going to navigate through case law summaries to get a more thorough explanation of non-standard term 3.1b's applicability to their specific situation if they can still phone somebody with a law degree.

[chongli]

Standard contracts exist for a variety of reasons, time/cost being one of them. Another one I'd like to highlight is the principal-agent problem[0]. If, due to automation, contracts went up by orders of magnitude in complexity then clients would be exposed to a new set of risks with a legal basis that they do not understand. The question then is: are these new, inscrutable risks acceptable to a client? Perhaps not, unless they are already a very large business.

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

[ZoeZoeBee]

Do you understand that accountants are one of the first to go with the advent of AI? It's a foregone conclusion that accountants will not be around in 2030, at least according to Bill Gates

[zardo]

Judging by the hours my patent attorney friend works, automating 50% of what he does would bring him down to a 60 hour work week.