Law is a very large and varied field. I have met other lawyers in the past and thought to myself, it's crazy that people would consider us to have the same job. In terms of the kind of work involved, the expected output, the training materials required and the economics of the business, law is in reality more like several distinct fields with varying degrees of overlap.

Usually when people talk about the legal field online they focus on the act of advocating in court, appealing to juries etc. But that is a relatively small fraction of the actual work that lawyers do. Drafting, negotiating and advising is the bread and butter of legal work.

A lot of the value added by lawyers isn't just in knowing how a particular clause would be interpreted by a court or whether it is in compliance with statute, but also knowing what terms are "market", what would likely be acceptable to counterparties or regulators, etc. LLMs could learn that stuff but it isn't enough that they are trained on case law and statute (which in itself is not a particularly difficult problem IMO). They would also need to be trained, at the very least, on actual contracts, and ideally also on deal correspondence and notes of advice (all of which are going to be much more difficult to come by). Otherwise, expecting an LLM to output quality legal product is like expecting it to produce quality C code when it has only been trained on the spec and no actual code.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of legal work that could be automated relatively easily. But probably a lot of that is at the low end of the market, where there just isn't that much money to be made by doing so. Your local small town lawyer who will draft your will or work on the sale of your home is not in the same bracket as the New York or London lawyer who advises on blockbuster private equity deals or IPOs. The latter is probably what will interest firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. Within those high value fields, I do think AI will make significant inroads but it will be through the firms themselves adopting AI rather than human lawyers being replaced en masse by AI lawyers.