alt Hacker NewsCan’t recall where I read it, but there was an interesting post about how AI was being received by the legal industry. There were largely two camps, those who got it and knew they must adopt and adapt, and those who got it but were like “why should I adopt something that directly reduces my billable hours?” It seemed pretty clear that the latter camp was not going to exist much longer. I guess this is playing out as expected.
> directly reduces my billable hours
Think about the adversaries using LLMs to generate ever-increasing preponderous walls of text that are mostly sycophantic and subtly legally blonde. If every adversary to my law firm generates 250% more text than before, our billable hours will balloon accordingly to the time it takes junior partners to read it all, digest it, redact, whatever. In fact, speaking of redacting, perhaps billable hours increase as you proofread your own LLM output. Regardless, LLMs should empower even criminal defendants to become quasi-eloquent and "type" 1,000wpm. It would seem that "reduces billable hours" is a naïve and premature prediction.