[rayiner]

> When AltFee won the ABA TECHSHOW 2024 Startup Alley competition, company representative Scott Leigh offered a simple proposition: our product will help you divorce from the billable hour.

This has been the promise of legal tech for more than a decade, and I have yet to see it deliver. Many lawyers got divorced from the billable hour long ago. For plaintiff's lawyers, for example, attorney hours are a cost center. Every hour a lawyer sinks into a contingency case is money out of the partners' pockets. They have every incentive to use legal tech to reduce their capital investment into these cases. But plaintiff's firms litigate cases more or less the same way defense-side firms that bill hourly do. That's a telling indicator of the shortcomings of legal tech.

AI might be different. I'm cautiously optimistic that agentic AI could do for lawyers the same thing it does for programers: act as a force multiplier that allows doing more work with fewer bodies. I'd love to be able to point an agent to years' of emails and prepare me a deposition outline for a witness. But the barriers to that are technological, not structural.