The recent valuation of $2B for AI startup Harvey is one of many indications that the legal profession is squarely "in the crucible" of GenAI disruption
GenAI is disrupting the legal industry, and it’s happening quickly.
Like dentists and plumbers, lawyers provide a necessary and important service, but unlike these other professions, a lot of the work can be automated.
Think about the ability of new AI tools to generate value from unstructured data (Word, PDF, etc.) and the vast corpus of law, case law, filings, briefs, and contracts, all with well-defined terms.
That makes the legal world a perfect place for AI to essentially take over. Powerful use cases abound, from enhanced discovery, to the creation of draft contracts based on previous versions, to analyzing and ranking the risks of sets of existing contracts. AI might summarize the roles and obligations of parties, or analyze differences between hundreds of SaaS contracts, etc.
Companies and individuals are already saving hundreds of hours with in-house GenAI solutions.
Using GenAI, many legal projects require significantly less time. If you are not seeing a reduction in time and cost for the same legal project before and after ChatGPT 3.5 was introduced, then you are leaving real money on the table.
Yes, a "human in the loop" is a necessity (don't be like the lawyer who submitted a GenAI-generated brief to the court without reviewing it and was fined $5,000 because the AI generated fake citations). But for some workloads, it makes sense to fully automate.
We’ve spoken with many law firms, and the responses vary widely, in part because law firms never viewed or invested in technology as a competitive differentiator.
A new demand for additional legal work related to AI IP, data use etc., will be created, but this won’t be enough to offset the trend.
We estimate that 50% of billable hours will go away. Law firms need to learn and adjust more quickly. The change tsunami is coming.
Which robots do you carry with you?
I currently carry six (ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Pi). I have them on my home/first screen on my iPhone and on my Chrome browser tab.
What is your configuration?
SEO Bloodbath
We continue to have many conversations with business leaders about the upcoming SEO Bloodbath. I ask the robots which airline is “best” in the US and got different answers.
Look out for these changes to happen sooner rather than later!