Thread

As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'

150 points · 162 comments · mooreds

dabinat · 1790566087 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. hackyhacky · 1790567305 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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?
  1. kshmir · 1790567632 · focus · HN ↗
    Except you probably pay cents in tokens for that, or included with your sub.
    hackyhacky · 1790568860 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    dudisubekti · 1790570187 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean that's just how life is? Exploit opportunities when they appear, find new ones when they run out.
    hackyhacky · 1790570622 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    dudisubekti · 1790578043 · focus · HN ↗
    Im a bit Darwinistic on this, like if a system can be disrupted easily, it means there are existing weaknesses that need to be addressed (taxis vs Uber, hotels vs Airbnb).
    If the established system can adapt to the disruption, then as consumers we have more choices.
    If the established system dies and the disruptor replaced it (DVD rental vs Netflix), then the disruptor, despite their weaknesses, do answer the consumer needs better.
    If both the established and disruptive system dies, then maybe they're not that important in the first place.
    hackyhacky · 1790597464 · focus · HN ↗
    Any system can be disrupted if you throw unlimited VC money at it.
  2. throwup238 · 1790567650 · focus · HN ↗
    If the human lawyer doesn’t proofread it, whats the point’s the point of a human lawyer? Scapegoat for the AI?
    hackyhacky · 1790568753 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    somenameforme · 1790573161 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  3. atoav · 1790567802 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    hackyhacky · 1790568586 · focus · HN ↗
    My comment was not intended to express support of using AI instead of lawyers, but rather to express the pointlessness of "disrupting" human lawyers.
    tzs · 1790577857 · focus · HN ↗
    If they literally copy-paste without checking and it turns out the AI was wrong and you suffer harm from that you can sue the lawyer for malpractice.
2. knollimar · 1790567858 · focus · HN ↗
  Weird take on a site with most of us coasting on a near zero marginal cost product.
  1. dataflow · 1790567945 · focus · HN ↗
    You develop software for your second client in 10 seconds?
    reverius42 · 1790569098 · focus · HN ↗
    Each additional copy? Only if it's really, really big. Otherwise it's under 2 seconds.
    warkdarrior · 1790571519 · focus · HN ↗
    Your SaaS web app takes more than 10 seconds to render in your client's web browser?
3. Der_Einzige · 1790568382 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. lurk2 · 1790569138 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    This isn’t true at all.
  2. georgeburdell · 1790569332 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    [deleted] · 1790569697 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    Razengan · 1790570612 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    shen · 1790571479 · focus · HN ↗
    How often are you satisfied with the answers from the customer service chatbot vs immediately looking for the talk to a human button?
    Razengan · 1790588003 · focus · HN ↗
    Never. Added that prayer
    hibikir · 1790570842 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    somenameforme · 1790572702 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    nradov · 1790574677 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think it will be a huge problem. People aren't going to commit more crimes so the caseload there won't increase much. "Jailhouse lawyers" might file more appeals of their own convictions but those seldom go very far.
    On the civil side, high-dollar disputes are already litigated. The real potential growth enabled by cheaper legal services will be in small claims. Those courts can be scaled up because they don't require a jury or even a real judge.
  3. hermannj314 · 1790570314 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    somenameforme · 1790572419 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    nradov · 1790574199 · focus · HN ↗
    The legal profession is hardly a priesthood. If you're referring to contracts, most of the language is pretty simple. You have to learn a bit of jargon but much less than in software development. I think a lot of people are just intimidated or lazy and don't even try.
    somenameforme · 1790575415 · focus · HN ↗
    Feel free to have a go at this: <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6028/text" rel="nofollow">https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6028...
    It's a critical law currently working its way through congress. It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution. And that's a trend - when things were done by people and for people, they tended to be brief and clear. As lawyers got involved, everything became a convoluted indecipherable mess which may as well be written in Latin.
    tzs · 1790577082 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution.
    I took a look at a few random sections of it and didn't see anything undecipherable, other than maybe things that lack enough context because it is written as a diff from the current law.
    The comparison to the length of the Constitution makes little sense to me. The Constitution establishes a framework and some power allocations. It says almost nothing about the bazillion lower level details necessary to actual have a functioning county.
    somenameforme · 1790579042 · focus · HN ↗
    The point I'm making about the discretion is that in the past the law would lay out a general framework, and that framework would be interpreted with some reasonable discretion assumed for its legal interpretation. And that is still the case. The only difference is that now laws are written in such a way that they're largely incomprehensible to non-lawyers, and I suspect even to most lawyers outside their domain of expertise.
    Obviously individual sections of a law are going to literally 'decipherable' in the sense that they are written in English, but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government. Or similarly the Bill of Rights lays out some of the most critical rights and restrictions in the US, yet each is no longer than a few sentences which are easily understood.
    tzs · 1790631920 · focus · HN ↗
    > [...] but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government.
    OK, but now in addition to understanding the structure of US government from reading the Constitution try to understand those things you ask of the bill: the incentive for passing the Constitution, its implications, and so forth.
    At the least you also need to read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist papers, many early debates in Congress over what the heck the Constitution means, many early Supreme Court cases, and probably a fair bit of history to understand the issues the country had under the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution was supposed to address.
    Same for the Bill of Rights.
    In modern terms things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are prompts. Bills and case law are implementations.
    The implementations are complicated because (1) law concerns people and what they do and people and their endeavors are complicated, (2) we have a whole lot of people in a large interconnected and interdependent economy, and (3) a whole lot of people look for any ambiguity they can find and try to exploit it for their own gain, often to great detriment to others, so bills need to be explicit to cover the edge cases.
    somenameforme · 1790643541 · focus · HN ↗
    Look at the language in that bill, or any, and you'll see that when it all comes down to it, it no in way whatsoever, covers all edge cases. The law constantly uses broad strokes and relies on reasonable interpretations to clarify ambiguities. And this is the same for all bills. The law isn't like code, and doesn't try to be like code. The obfuscation is completely unnecessary.
    Similarly when I speak of the motivation for things, I'm not speaking of some subtle and nuanced historical understanding of motivation, but simply what something does and why somebody might want it. If somebody is of average intelligence they can easily infer such from the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and so forth. But in that bill I referenced, you can't even ELI5 the law, let alone why or what it would change. It's an obfuscated mess. And none of this is necessary at all.
    JumpCrisscross · 1790582096 · focus · HN ↗
    That law is essentially a diff. The USC (the actual statute) tends to be easier to read through.
4. alphasm · 1790568512 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. tsss · 1790590539 · focus · HN ↗
    > then it is clear where this is leading
    Lawyers lobbying to outlaw AI-generated legal documents?
    sillyfluke · 1790595815 · focus · HN ↗
    They surely would if they could, but since they will inevitably use it themselves they would need to collude and make a deal with the AI companies to find some way to keep the public out and law firms in (one example being targeted knee-capping of the free and low price tiers with respect to legal matters).
    The ridiculous overcharging thing was something I thought the entire public was well versed in, so the idea that someone could earnestly think that they would get a discount seems absurd to me. As I recall, even the Oscars gift bags given to nominees in one of the years contained a prenup template supposedly crafted by best-in-business (divorce?) lawyers where you just needed to fill in the blanks. If you weren't getting a discount before AI, you are not getting a discount with AI I would presume.
    It is understandable to see the moat as the illiteracy of the public regarding the legal system because the concerted effort to keep that illiteracy in place is a disgrace. But when the stakes are high, the moat still is finding a lawyer who knows their shit and one you can hold accountable. Which is why I find the idea of lawyers being dependent on AI much more terrifying.
    marcusb · 1790602113 · focus · HN ↗
    *outlaw AI-generated legal documents by non-lawyers.
  2. fluidcruft · 1790600831 · focus · HN ↗
    That happens even when AI isn't involved.
5. tiffanyh · 1790570116 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. beaned · 1790570391 · focus · HN ↗
    One is transparent and the other feels like a lie.
    Not in principle, but in practice.
  2. atherton94027 · 1790570464 · focus · HN ↗
    They still need to proofread the doc and make sure it applies to their client though?
  3. thayne · 1790571115 · focus · HN ↗
    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).
  4. sa46 · 1790571388 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    otterley · 1790571721 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would it be fraudulent if the fee agreement disclosed it?
    sa46 · 1790572589 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    baq · 1790574283 · focus · HN ↗
    They bill with hourly granularity
    crote · 1790575351 · focus · HN ↗
    And that would be fine, if you were getting an hour of their time. If the lawyer spent 10 minutes finding the right template, 10 seconds filling it in, and then 20 minutes proofreading it, then nobody would be complaining.
    In reality they'll spend 1 minute grabbing a close-enough template, 10 seconds filling it in, 3 minutes billing you, and 55 minutes double-dipping by doing work for other clients.
    knollimar · 1790591228 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn't it usually .1 hour increments?
    otterley · 1790587870 · focus · HN ↗
    > The fee agreement was an hourly rate for producing a legal document.
    We don’t know that for certain.
    gspr · 1790580423 · focus · HN ↗
    In the lawyer's case one might argue that it's just a time quantization inaccuracy. There's no smaller unit of time than an hour for them.
    One can argue that there should be, but billing in 10 second increments might also be a bit much to ask.
    One would hope that they would at least aggregate multiple smaller-than-resolution time blocks into one before billing though. (Five documents over the course of a week ends up costing the same)
6. lurk2 · 1790570170 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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?
  1. siva7 · 1790571219 · focus · HN ↗
    did i miss something? are developers regulated since last month?
    baq · 1790574310 · focus · HN ↗
    No, they are irrelevant.
    The people and their experience is still very valuable, but having been in the business since early 2000s the job shouldn’t be called ‘software developer’ anymore. Even ‘software engineer’ is somewhat inadequate given what the end product is vs what is actually being engineered by humans. ‘Software factory process automation engineer’ maybe counts?
  2. fcarraldo · 1790599420 · focus · HN ↗
    pretty sure it’s more Wild West than ever out here. engineers aren’t even reading the code anymore.
7. mrheosuper · 1790570422 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
8. MichaelRo · 1790571506 · focus · HN ↗
  >> 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./
9. otterley · 1790571654 · focus · HN ↗
  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
  1. revolvingthrow · 1790572750 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    rpunkfu · 1790573198 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. [deleted] · 1790583754 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  3. analog31 · 1790597660 · focus · HN ↗
    The other version of this joke:
    Customer: $500 for 10 minutes of work? That's more than I make as a brain surgeon.
    Plumber: It's more than I made as a brain surgeon too.
  4. harpersealtako · 1790621862 · focus · HN ↗
    alternatively:
    pipe tapping: $5
    knowing where to tap: $95
    taking on the legal liability and accountability in case the water heater explodes: $400
    ChatGPT is more than capable of telling you where to tap, but you can't sue openAI if it gets it wrong and your water heater explodes.
10. glenngillen · 1790573018 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
11. fbrncci · 1790573998 · focus · HN ↗
  I think this is mostly a thing in the west. I was very surprised when I moved to Asia, and ended up emailing with lawyers back and forth for weeks, getting the right documents; the right advice, and then charged money the moment there actually was "work" to do, and I needed to hire them. It was shocking to me, because by that time I would have already spend $1000+ on a lawyer in Europe or the US.
12. xgbi · 1790574472 · focus · HN ↗
  I like that metaphor, because it translates well into software:
  - You have a problem.
  - Someone takes the time to fix that problem for $10k worth of coding time.
  - Now they sell 1000s of clients the same software for $99, with 0s of work.
  What's is the difference with your case?
13. palmotea · 1790580901 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.
  You almost certainly work in technology/software. If you (or your employers) sells software in any form, you're doing the same fucking thing.
  Their box of templates is equivalent to a library or a SaaS application.
  1. tpoacher · 1790583445 · focus · HN ↗
    with the exception that in software there typically isn't an expectation that the client does their own debugging before accepting the software, and any bugs that manifest in said software after purchase treated as the client's fault for not spotting them.
    so yeah, not the best analogy.
    fcarraldo · 1790599280 · focus · HN ↗
    no, it’s worse. software users will randomly be flagged to be testers of new code without their knowledge or consent. they don’t have to accept changes in SaaS, they get what you give them and they pay you for the privilege of having their software change in undesirable ways and having to contact support when it breaks.
    palmotea · 1790602465 · focus · HN ↗
    > with the exception that in software there typically isn't an expectation that the client does their own debugging before accepting the software,
    There totally is. I don't think there's any industry where a customer can really get away with not testing the products of their suppliers. With software you need to test it and confirm you're getting the results you expect, rather than blindly trusting the vendor.
    > and any bugs that manifest in said software after purchase treated as the client's fault for not spotting them.
    I'm not sure about B2B licenses (I've never been involved in contracts), but I'm pretty sure for a lot of B2C software, the user is responsible for the output and the vendor's liability is severely capped (like no more than refunding the purchase price).
    If there is an Excel bug that costs you a lot of money, you the user are responsible. Microsoft's not going to pay you to make you whole (and I'm pretty confident about that, because logically, if it were otherwise the risk to them would be extreme and they'd probably be bankrupt).
14. Havoc · 1790582409 · focus · HN ↗
  Depends on the type of lawyer / work being done.
  If it’s just copy paste templates then you never really needed a lawyer in the first place. Thats paralegal at best
15. georgefrowny · 1790582482 · focus · HN ↗
  All UK conveyancing solicitors are in this picture too. 90% of what they do is shuffle standard paperwork and chase other solicitors for their standard paperwork, all incredibly slowly. I would be entirely unsurprised if in a typical transaction, N clients' £1000*N of solicitors could be replaced by £10 of AI and a couple of hours of human time in total.
16. plastic-enjoyer · 1790587733 · focus · HN ↗
  > Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.
  I wonder how easily lawyers will let their industry get disrupted. I think lawyers may be one of the few professions that have the means and the edge to push back.
17. fluidcruft · 1790600771 · focus · HN ↗
  Now AI will proofread it and quality improves.

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