All UK conveyancing solicitors are in this picture too. 90% of what they do is shuffle standard paperwork and chase other solicitors for their standard paperwork, all incredibly slowly. I would be entirely unsurprised if in a typical transaction, N clients' £1000*N of solicitors could be replaced by £10 of AI and a couple of hours of human time in total.

> My experience with lawyers is that if you need a legal document, they often have templates ready to go and will take 10 seconds to find & replace your company name into the document. I know this because they often don’t proofread it afterwards. They then charge you $1000 for that 10 seconds of work. Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.

You almost certainly work in technology/software. If you (or your employers) sells software in any form, you're doing the same fucking thing.

Their box of templates is equivalent to a library or a SaaS application.

This reminds me of the parable about the plumber.

A plumber comes over to repair a broken water heater. He looks at it, taps a pipe with his wrench, and it's fixed. He hands the customer a bill for $500. The customer becomes angry because all the plumber did was tap a pipe, and demands to see an itemized bill.

The plumber dutifully provides the bill:

* Pipe tapping: $5

* Knowing where to tap: $495

Depends on the type of lawyer / work being done.

If it’s just copy paste templates then you never really needed a lawyer in the first place. Thats paralegal at best

I recently had a similar experience where it became very clear that the lawyers were using AI to draft the agreements. Though it was very accurate and pedantic on some matters, it got other things completely wrong because it was not provided with full context, and full context is very difficult to provide.

The lawyers did not properly review the agreements, causing post-signature discovery of major issues and having to redo and execute all the agreements a second time, leading to inflated lawyer bills.

If the lawyer is going to prompt the same AI that I can prompt myself and is not going to review the agreements thoroughly, then it is clear where this is leading.

Do you have any issues with thr tech industry selling software licenses?

Because a lawyer selling a contract template, is in many ways, very similar in concept to tech industry selling a software license/seat.

They are both akin to “templates”, and selling IP.

I think this is mostly a thing in the west. I was very surprised when I moved to Asia, and ended up emailing with lawyers back and forth for weeks, getting the right documents; the right advice, and then charged money the moment there actually was "work" to do, and I needed to hire them. It was shocking to me, because by that time I would have already spend $1000+ on a lawyer in Europe or the US.

> I know this because they often don’t proofread it afterwards.

It’s hilarious to see people complaining about lawyers being overpaid and incompetent on a forum dedicated to an industry that was completely unregulated up until about a month ago. A lawyer can be disbarred from his profession for making these kinds of mistakes; can you?

The lawyer I ended up using for a lot of my structuring happily admitted as much when I was shopping around for someone to do what I needed. I said something along the lines of "all the other quotes I've got are obviously more expensive, I have to think that's because they've put a lot more work into them to cover/mitigate any precedent I need to be concerned with and/or are better equipped defend these documents if we end up in court". His reply was: "Oh sweet summer child! You think any of us are showing up in court to defend these contracts!? No. If someone has issues with any of these, you'll send them to me and I'll charge you my rate to deal with them. If we need use a clause in these contracts to protect ourselves or get what we're owed then I'll send a bunch of stern emails about it, and I'll charge you my rate. But if anything ever ends up in court... hah... that's not us man. Now you're having to find a lawyer that specialises in litigation. Nobody that you're speaking to about these documents right now is going to show up in court to defend these documents. That's not how it works".

When I pushed the others it turns out he was right (except for one especially large firm who basically did everything, but it may as well have been a collection of a dozen different companies). Really appreciated his honesty but was all the more baffled by how the whole industry hadn't already been disrupted.

I like that metaphor, because it translates well into software:

- You have a problem.

- Someone takes the time to fix that problem for $10k worth of coding time.

- Now they sell 1000s of clients the same software for $99, with 0s of work.

What's is the difference with your case?

Not really fair comparison. I agree they are ripping us, but the "template" is like a source code. It takes time and money to write and maintain it.

Weird take on a site with most of us coasting on a near zero marginal cost product.

Lawyer jokes are on point and on brand for a reason.

They grift about as hard as tech workers did pre-2022. Relying on the fact that no one can easily audit their work to justify their one hour of actually work despite making easily 300K+ a year.

Please kill their golden goose. Most lawyers are actively harmful to society.

>> They then charge you $1000 for that 10 seconds of work. Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.

Ahh, the salaryman lament against contract workers (plumbers, car mechanics, lawyers etc): he makes $25/hour, why don't they charge similar or less?

Because unlike you, who get a steady stream of money even if only sitting on your ass, these people only make a living if someone calls them and asks a job done. If lawyers would charge per effective time spent as much as you would deem negligible on your side, they'd have to work a construction worker job to make a living and do lawyering on the side./

> I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.

Because you'd rather pay your $1000 to OpenAI for 5 milliseconds of work, instead of to a human lawyer for 10 seconds of work?