Let's see what happens when you try and replace a lawyer with AI
Let's take this apart.
1. This guy even points out that what the person was offering to do would not have been illegal, and it would not have been practicing law. So this argument looks like a frivolous charge.
2. This is not how I envision AI replacing lawyers.
A. I expect the first to go would be paralegals, they represent 14% of lawfirms (419,000 in the US).
B. I would then expect teams of lawyers would be whittled down. Sometimes these big firms will have 3 or 4 lawyers sitting at the table, I can see that being reduced to 1 or 2.
C. A lot of law never goes to court. People hire lawyers to read contracts, write contracts, wills, etc. I suspect much of this work will be done by AI.
D. I see AI becoming an assistant to a lawyer. He will direct it to write a letter, write a contract, review a contract, research legal precedent, etc. Previously this person might have needed a partner and a paralegal, now he can do it with just the AI.
3. He pointed out that the ChatGPT was excellent at defining what the lemon law was but was terrible at describing what to do if you were a victim. AI is based on what you give it to study. If you give AI a digital library of every single legal case and precedent ever, and the law, and every textbook on law, every legal journal, and every non fiction book on the law, and even every fictional legal thriller, you can train it to be much better.
4. AI is also trained by feedback. So if you start out replacing paralegals and the lawyers give feedback on the research it will train the AI as a whole. Paralegals make about 40k a year. So if you charged 10k for an AI paralegal for a year, and the firm had access 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you could get almost instant feedback on your requests and you no longer needed to subscribe to various legal journals, it would be a no brainer. There are 419,000 paralegals and legal assistants in the US. It would be much cheaper to have the AI and in a single year the feedback to the AI would be like 10,000 lifetimes of experience. After the first year no paralegal could compare to this.
5. Think how easy it would be to train AI to write wills and contracts. Feed it all the wills and contracts that you can find. At first it would simply be a feature of the paralegal, but all the edits, corrections and feedback lawyers around the country would make would convert a decent program into a program equal to or superior to any lawyer in the country.
The lawsuits have no future. It will be the biggest and most feared firms that adopt this first. They will save hundreds of thousands of dollars and they will be able to provide much better service.