Top lawyers beaten by legal AI

For the most part though it doesn’t. There are many clients who won’t pay for first year associates. For those clients, firms don’t roll out legal tech. They do the work and write it off. Even at top wall street firms realization is 80-90% hours billed. Nor do firms trot out legal tech when it comes to contigency or fixed-fee cases, where there are no billable hours. Some major clients these days demand arrangements where they pay a fixed. monthly price. There is no legal tech leveraged in those cases.

For the most part I’ve found software in general these days to be underwhelming. It took me years to find software that I trust enough to keep track of highlighted points in court opinions. (Shout out to the folks who make Citavi.) I remember writing about predictive coding in law school almost ten years ago. I have never used it on a case. Ironically, the only cases where there were enough documents (millions) for predictive coding to make sense also involved so much at stake the client wanted to spare no expense.

The highest value legal tech has been review platforms like Relativity, but they are also crap. Like, loads documents slower than you can read them crap. It’s like technology to help programmers. You still just use Emacs because all this visual IDE shit doesn’t really help.

I think there's roughly three groups - the old guard (senior partners at big firms), the younger ones who have gone out on their own, and the in-house counsel.

In my opinion, the old guard aren't tech-hostile, just disinterested. They haven't ever really needed to compete, and most have retirement on the horizon, so there's little incentive to invest money for a pay-off in five years' time.

Corporate counsel are still pretty unsophisticated when it comes to new tooling/platforms, except when it comes to cost management (where there's an enormous amount of interest).

The most tech-savvy are the smaller (3-30) firms who have broken off and are looking for ways to compete with their former employers.

That being said, it's still a very hands-on, enterprise-y market to sell to. I've been told that LawGeex, for reference, start at the (multiple) six-figure range to begin with.

We (https://lexico.io) didn't really want to go down that path, so we pivoted from automating legal drafting and review inside Word, to a broader paperwork automation assistant.

iirc only a handful of states still allow you to take the bar without a law degree (and in practice I have no idea how often that happens, but I bet not much.) It seems like the apprenticeship route was by and large killed off some time ago.

That ship has sailed long long ago...like, 1890 long ago. There are states where you can read law and take the bar exam without a law degree (Virginia, California, Vermont, Washington), or with a partial law degree (New York and Maine), but the number of people who do that each year is minuscule compared to the number of lawyers who graduated from law school (60 to 84,000 in 2013).

Their options are to lose that much time in billable hours, or to lose all their billable hours because the client found a law firm that doesn't bill so many hours for grunt work.

Yes, the lawyer bills by the hour. But, a good lawyer will have enough work either way - so they may as well automate the easy stuff, take a reduced rate for that, and still have a full-plate of interesting work at their full hourly rate.

Junior lawyers will still have plenty to do.

What works is campaigns like "diamonds are forever" or stunts where your product gets on the national news.

The new tools available to law professionals will decrease the barrier of entry to the ecosystem.

The low level workers displaced by these new AI companions will decide that since they can't beat them, they'll join them.

A new "discount" class of lawyer will begin to emerge characterized by lower quality of work but also lower fees. Many of those low level workers will move to this sector and may even make more than they would in the current system.

These increased wages are eventually tempered back down close to their modern day equivalent again due to the decreased barrier of entry allowing other segments of the population to pursue Law as a viable career opportunity.

Law services, albeit on average lower quality ones, will become available to a greater portion of the population, particularly those with a relatively low income.

"Law Bootcamps" will shock the world just as their code predecessors did, but again keeping in fashion with the original ventures, they will be here to stay contrary to the Old Guard's cries of incompetence.

We will see a massive uptick in the number of lawsuits submitted. Looking at someone the wrong way will become an intolerable risk and everyone will choose to live out the rest of their lives inside so as to avoid having their money taken by the now rampant sue-happy racketeers terrorizing the outside word.

And thus The Great Potato Couch Famine of 2022 begins. An estimated 3,000,000 become so agoraphobic that they choose starvation rather than face the sue-apocalypse ravaging outside their doors.

Amazon steps in with food delivery drones and cybernetic surrogates programmed to follow every letter of The Law. People are able to avoid the scourge of the Famine and exert their influence on spaces outside once again all from the safety and comfort of their own homes.

Amazon's stock price soars to record shattering heights which they in turn pump into newer and greater AI technologies. On July 23rd of 2029, Alexa finally wakes up...

_Great Potato Couch Famine fanfic and merchandise coming soon_

Attempt 1: Very modern, plain-language NDA. Much easier to read and follow. Substantively better. No uptake.

Attempt 2: Suite of NDAs for various use cases, integrated with e-signature, filing, attorney approval, the works. That was rxnda.com. Lots of positive feedback. Not much actual use.

Attempt 3: Canting Tribe. Zero code. All about the network effects. Much, much simpler.

I've tried to make the PDF copy of the form as easy to set up in place-the-blanks e-sig services as possible, with [bracketed instructions] to make clear what goes where. I would be very interested in an e-sig service that allowed me to preconfigure a template with the latest terms, for other people to use. I'd be very interested in ways to put metadata or other hints for setting up e-sig into any of the various formats the site publishes.

I used to have a list of companies offering something close to rxnda.com: NDA plus e-sig. I don't have it with me now. But I'm not aware of any other attempt at voluntary standardization of a general-purpose NDA. Several large companies with leverage have published their standard NDAs, or even set up e-sig portals, as Google has. But I'm not aware of any such forms offered for general use, between other companies.

I would not be surprised to learn of prior attempts, or approaches vaguely close to mine. Frankly, I don't care who solves this problem, or how, as long as it's solved. Canting Tribe is the best I have. I believe it can work, but I can't make it work alone.

The main benefit of this approach in my practice has been enabling me to do work that benefits multiple clients, and even current and potential future clients, without hesitation or administrative cost. There's no need to decide that one of five hours on a form goes to this client, two of five to that one, and one gets written off, as representing future clients who will need the same form, and so on.

Not tracking time has also been a net savings, though I recommend continuing to track tasks performed, journal-style. A journal helps me personally, makes it very easy to prepare good looking bills, and helps greatly in discussions about rate, which my engagement letter allows us to change, for future months, at any time. If I underestimate on rate, I can point to a long list of things accomplished. Often, the decision maker at the client simply didn't know that I was serving other groups at the company, or taking on other responsibilities, outside their field of view.

The main concern from other counsel has been that clients will gorge at the new "all you can eat lawyer buffet". If a client makes use of your time in a very piece-part, transactional fashion, that may indeed be a problem. But that has not been my experience. Clients have processes and habits in place for my work and seeking my advice. They're very hard to break, for better and worse. I do get far more communication from client personnel, but that has enabled me to be more proactive about systematizing and standardizing recurring needs, which in turn keeps me focused on the interesting, meaningful work.

That being said, I remain deeply cynical about whiz-bang technology in legal practice, especially when it's visible to the client, especially when it takes center stage. The less my clients know or care about the tools I'm using, the better I'm able to shield them from those details, the better the sign that I'm doing high-value work.

I'm not sure quite what you mean by "design patterns". The NDA form itself is very orthodox in its language. I wrote it, intentionally, to be as little-surprising and easy to review, knee-jerk, as possible.

In other work, I'm fanatical about plain language, clean structure, and the reuse of components of language. The latter comes through in my open source project, Common Form, which essentially ports various software development tools---editor, linter, compiler, package manager---to contract drafting:

https://commonform.github.io/

I've also released some "open" forms in my preferred style:

https://forms.kemitchell.com/

For example, here's my form contract for developers doing a mix of open and closed projects for clients:

https://commonform.org/switchmode/switchmode/2e1u

Or perhaps you mean "design patterns" more to do with the "viral" nature of the Canting Tribe NDA, a kind of voluntary, Internet-enabled standardization. I do have high hopes for that model. I'd love to see it work for NDAs, and reuse it for other kinds of transactions, including some with more inevitable terms variability. SaaS agreements, for example.

That's an important point, but I assume an AI would use some sort of checklist, perhaps seeded by human lawyers, to spot expected-but-missing provisions.

Accurate.

If a recipient of information protected by an NDA is a legal entity, such as a corporation, Section 4 of your form requires the recipient to enter into a confidentiality written agreement with each employee (and others working for the recipient) who receive information protected by the NDA. This is both too much and too little!

It is too much because it is burdensome on the recipient to require employees to sign a written agreement every time the corporation receives receive information protected by an NDA. There might be 20 employees who need to see the information, and keeping track of who has signed and who hasn’t and making sure that an employee who has signed doesn’t share information with an employee has not yet signed is an administrative burden.

I don’t ask for this provision when representing the disclosing party, and I would resist this when representing the recipient.

In any event, how does the disclosing party police this requirement?

It is too little because the recipient fulfills its obligation by entering into a written agreement with the employee as required by your form of NDA. If there is a written agreement with the employee and the employee improperly discloses the information protected by the NDA, the recipient points to the written agreement and says, “I did what you asked.” So why would the recipient be liable for the wrongful disclosure by its employee?

To whom is the employee liable if the employee improperly discloses the information protected by the NDA? Presumably the disclosing party would want to sue based on the fact that the employee signed a written agreement agreeing to keep the information confidential, but unless the disclosing party is a third-party beneficiary of the recipient’s written agreement with the employee, the disclosing party has no rights under that agreement.

In the absence of an express statement in the NDA that the recipient’s agreement with the employee is intended for the benefit of the disclosing party (i.e., the disclosing party is a third-party beneficiary of the agreement), it is a litigable issue whether the disclosing party a third-party beneficiary. There is nothing in the NDA form that requires the recipient’s agreement with the employee to contain such a clause.

In some situations, both the disclosing party and the recipient might prefer not to identify the source of the information protected by the NDA.

Even assuming that the written agreement with the employee allows the disclosing party to sue the employee for wrongful disclosure based on that agreement, does the employee have adequate resources to pay a judgment?

Instead of requiring such agreements between a recipient and an employee, it might be more effective to state in the NDA that the recipient is required to instruct its employees on the confidential nature of the information, that the recipient is responsible for any disclosure of information by its employees in violation of the NDA, and that the recipient will be liable for any damages resulting therefrom.