For example, “AI” discovery requires tons of handholding and careful training/QA. The process is so complicated, it’s really only practical for very large document sets. Ironically, these huge document sets only tend to arise in highly valuable commercial litigation, where clients have strong incentives to demand human second level review anyway, mitigating much of the cost advantage. In practice, the biggest advance in discovery in the last 10-15 years has actually been culling document sets based in search terms (“fake” NEAR “testing results”).
The article also takes a jab at legal outsourcing and makes it seem like AI has had a bigger impact than outsourcing. Not so. The trend of clients demanding that low level work be outsourced to contract attorneys has had ten times the impact on law firm economics compared to any legal technology invented in the last decade.
At bottom, the article is based on a fundamental mistake about the industry:
> What kind of repeat buyer lets the seller push the price up every year for doing the same thing in the same way, where the product stays the same and there is no improvement in the outcome? One answer to that is: a buyer who is faced by a monopoly.
Today’s clients are savvy. They’ll bring in half a dozen firms to pitch any substantial matter, getting dozens of hours of free legal analysis from each just as table stakes. Fees are capped, rates are discounted, and success-based fee arrangements are routine. The legal industry is stiffly competitive, even at the very top. (Thanks to conflicts rules, consolidation in law has been limited. So there are dozens of firms that you would consider just the “top firms”).
On the whole, lawyers keep getting more expensive for the same reason as programmers in Silicon Valley or nannies in Manhattan. The stakes are high compared to the costs, and there is a rush to quality even in light of economic concerns.