[jedberg]

Lawyers bill by the hour. It is not in their interest to speed up what they do, because they only have so many clients. They would need far more clients to bill the same hours.

I used AI to save my last company thousands of dollars, and more importantly weeks of time. When I had to negotiate a contract, I'd just have Claude legal make the redlines against the counterparty for me. Sometimes their lawyer even complimented my "lawyer" on how thorough it was.

Only when a final contract was agreed on did I engage my human lawyer for final review (and usually they didn't find anything of concern).

For standard contracts, AI is pretty good.

[jstanley]

> Lawyers bill by the hour. It is not in their interest to speed up what they do, because they only have so many clients.

This isn't how markets work.

If one lawyer starts doing 10x as much work in the same number of hours, then all the customers will move to that lawyer as soon as they find out, and the other lawyers will have to adapt to remain competitive.

[blueone]

The legal market is competitive, but it is not a normal open market. Model Rule 5.4 is a good example. In a lot of jurisdictions, law firms generally can’t have nonlawyer owners, share legal fees with non-lawyers, or let outside businesses control lawyer judgment, “the fastest lawyer just gets all the customers” is too simple. So if even law, one of the most protected professional labor markets through its own institutional self-protection, voluntarily hollows itself out through AI, that should worry everyone because we would all be screwed. Everyday workers would have no defense against AI aggressive corporations.

[dash2]

Lawyers are extremely well-organized, and not surprisingly, know the law. They always have found ways to limit competition. (Why else would it be such a well-paid job?)

[mjhay]

It’s not so well-paying anymore, especially given the onerous education requirements. The exception is for the few who get hired in biglaw firms

[nitwit005]

I'd expect the market to only work like that for business clients. If I grabbed a person off the street and asked them how they'd evaluate a lawyer's productivity, I suspect they'd generally have no idea.

People are clearly hiring lawyers based on silly billboard ads, after all.

[bluefirebrand]

You forgot a crucial step, which is that the lawyer would have to charge less than the competition per person and make up the difference in volume

You don't go to the overworked lawyer if they still charge just as much as their competitors

[roenxi]

And for a thought experiment - if a lawyer controls the pace of their work, why work at any reasonable speed? They could take the client's money and go picnic or something then put in 20 minutes at the end of the day.

Something is forcing them to put in long hours. It's the market.

[jedberg]

Because they have ethics rules to only bill for hours actually worked. If they did that, they would only get paid for 20 minutes of work.

[roenxi]

Huh? Obviously. The example was that they do 20 minutes of work. Of course they bill for 20 minutes.

It'd be a line item: "I worked for 20 minutes. Pay me lots of money". Similar principle to locksmiths when they walk over, do a few seconds of work and charge a hundred bucks. If a lawyer uses the same principle and works for 20 minutes they could target $10k/day.

That isn't a plan that'd work, but if "their interests" were the thing controlling how many hours they worked then that'd be what they would do. They're going to be forced to use AI by the same influences that make them work for full days.

[HyperL0gi]

That’s a supply and demand issue. If there were more clients than lawyers, I can totally see a reality where they speed things up because now in one week they can work on 20 cases instead of 2, thus 10x more money, but as you said, it doesn't seem to be the reality of the market.

edit: tldr; it does not seem in their best interests to be more efficient at this point

[Traubenfuchs]

> Lawyers bill by the hour. It is not in their interest to speed up what they do, because they only have so many clients.

Just like in IT, in law billed hours by one person have little correlation to hours spent working by that person (or others!). The billing does affect customer/client retention and reputation though.

[District5524]

If you involve a lawyer only for the final review, they will understand you don't want them to rethink your approach nor to advise a different strategy. So, they will just bill you for the time, which seems to be fine for both parties of the trade. And, where it's mandatory to have a law firm draft a deed or a contract (like for mortgage or real estate transactions, depending on the state you're in), your Claude-made first draft will not make your bill lower. Just don't try to rely on this for adversarial work, like in litigation. BTW, just curious about the timing: how could Claude for Legal save you thousands of dollars at your last company if the product came out in February? (Not that Claude for Legal is any special in its legal output compared to "ordinary" Claude)

[jedberg]

> If you involve a lawyer only for the final review, they will understand you don't want them to rethink your approach nor to advise a different strategy

These were enterprise contracts where the other company made the contract. It was basically negotiating specific points of the contract. Claude legal called out a few areas that were disadvantageous to us, and then prepared redlines to send back. The same thing my lawyer was doing for me before I switched to using Claude, except I was waiting a week for each turnaround and paying for a few hours of billable hours every time.

> BTW, just curious about the timing: how could Claude for Legal save you thousands of dollars at your last company if the product came out in February?

Negotiating bespoke enterprise contracts can get expensive, especially when the other party is a huge corporation with a big legal team and a lot of time on their hands. And only the latest product came out in February, there were other products before that.

[gamblor956]

There weren't any legal trained AI contact review products available last year outside of the Westlaw and Lexus products only available to lawyers.

[piker]

These are probably contracts where a lawyer would struggle to add value anyway, or you wouldn’t have hired them in the first place. Seems more likely a Jevon’s paradox example to me than anything.

[jedberg]

Most certainly not. These were enterprise licensing agreements where the other party was a large corporation who had a lot of lawyers and time. I was using the human lawyer for these before switching to Claude legal. Both produced roughly the same output (redlines to fix the things that were disadvantageous to us).

[piker]

Yes, that sounds like the former case. The fact that you were so satisfied with the switch supports the point. It's boring work that is routine and expensive. It's right to automate the first turn.

[gamblor956]

Your future legal counterparties will thank you for using AI to draft your contracts. It's going to make lawsuits so much easier...for them.

AI is great at extremely simple contracts for which most lawyers just use standardized templates. Incidentally the same templates used to train the AI you used.