alt Hacker NewsLawyers 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.
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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)
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.
> 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.
> 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.