A Fistful of Vibes
Is law practice one thing, many things, or vibes?
I ran across an interesting non-AI app whilst trolling my LinkedIn feed: Heavyweight.cc, which promises “All of the gravitas, none of the fees.” Basically, it’s a fake law firm letterhead generator that lets you easily generate scary lawyerly-looking letters to the recipient/victim of your choice:
Looks scary! As the creators of this tool shrewdly point out:
The law is as much about appearance as it is actual practice, and letterhead is a great place to illustrate that. Law is a credence good—it’s often difficult or impossible for non-lawyers to tell how good the legal services they’re receiving are.
…
Basically, at least some of what lawyers sell is lawyer vibes.
An aside: if what lawyers sell is vibes, then vibes could, in theory, be the practice of law. And if this site is providing lawyer vibes, how is it not infringing on the practice of law? That’s where freedom of speech comes it, kind of. Creating a fake letterhead generator is protected speech, but printing the fake letter out and sending it to threaten your enemies with pretend lawyer letters is, maybe, not protected speech. YMMV.
But, I think, law practice is obviously more than just vibes, and whenever we get close to talking about whether AI will replace lawyers, it’s worth thinking about the “bundle of tasks” that make up the idea of lawyer work. A non-exhaustive list of lawyer tasks / subtasks, in no real order:
Drafting pleadings
Drafting motions, briefs, etc.
Creating legal arguments
Refining legal arguments
Negotiating with client, opposing parties, and third parties
Attending court hearings, presenting arguments in court, communicating with court staff, etc.
Legal research
Keeping up to date on changes in law
Fact-finding / discovery / investigation
Synthesizing legal research and factual research
And communicating / arguing / negotiating that
Comparative analysis of fact patterns
Office communication tasks:
Emails
Calendaring
Figuring out where files are in the system
Communicating with clients
Giving advice on what to (or not to) do
Telling them what the possible futures could be
Telling them why something happened
Deciding on whether or not to take on a client
Cost-benefit analysis / win-lose analysis
Trustworthiness analysis
Can this client afford to hire me? Is it worth taking them on if they can’t?
Asking: Is this a type of case I can take on and actually handle?
Or can I learn how to do this in a way that doesn’t harm my client?
Getting new clients
Advertising, and making sure it’s not violating bar rules
Building / writing website content
Building relationships with potential referral sources
Running the law business
Payroll, taxes, and accounting
Office tasks like buying supplies
Contracting for office space, managing how to pay rent and utilities, etc.
Lawyer Vibing (I guess)
Not all lawyers will have to do all these tasks - hopefully a biglaw associate is not handling firm payroll.
So where does AI come in here? It’s really good at AI-vibing, but “Lawyer Vibing” is probably different that whatever AI-vibing is (Lawyer Vibes give more of a Jack McCoy or Jessica Pearson type aura), and just one point out of many on my big, non-exhaustive list. But AI is really good at doing or supplementing a lot of these discreet tasks, such as writing website content, helping with refining arguments, writing or rewriting emails, figuring out where stuff is in the online file system, etc.
I don’t think lawyers are just a collection of discreet tasks. When we talk about “Practicing at the top of our licenses” there’s probably a vibes component in there somewhere. Maybe, in a weird way, law practice isn’t a single thing that lawyers do, but instead is more akin to the “Bundle of Sticks” fable. Or is it the Ship of Theseus, where even though the individual components change over time, as long as the original purpose remains it’s the same?
Fail Forward:
There’s an interesting article in the NYT that talks about how big companies are racing to “deploy AI” but most have yet to see any huge transformative gains. Many improvements are modest - 15 minutes off of what used to be an hour-long service call, for example. We’re expected to hit the “trough of disillusionment” in the Gartner Hype Cycle sometime in the next year or so, at least according to the Gartner folks, and I guess they should know. Honestly, back in 2022 I thought we would hit it in 2024, but here we are.
Thinking about our bundle of tasks I listed out above, there’s only two that I would say are completely new since the dawn of the information age: emails and writing website content. And even those are just version 2.0 of things that already existed. The advent of computers, the internet, and digital watches didn’t actually eliminate any of those tasks - it changed them in different ways. Client communication went from being predominately letters sent through the mail to email, discovery went from entire gaggles of lawyers sifting through warehouses of paper file boxes to determine relevancy and privilege to eDiscovery on computers. Instead of reading cases in a hardbound reporter and Shepardizing them, lawyers read cases on a computer and look for the little yellow or red flag (or now ask the AI inside Westvlexis). Instead of typing out a document on a typewriter, lawyers create documents on a computer, or if they’re really snazzy, supervise the creation of lots of documents through document automation software. But the work remains.
Don’t get me wrong here - I think generative AI has the potential to improve or alter a lot of those tasks. But to do that we’re going to have to rethink those tasks, why they’re important, and whether or not there’s a better way to get to the end result, rather than just putting some AI on them. In the meantime, I think we have to be ready to try things that may or may not work, and be willing to shut down the things that don’t. From the article:
Lori Beer, the global chief information officer at JPMorgan, oversees a worldwide technology staff of 60,000. Has she shut down A.I. projects? Probably hundreds in total, she said.
But many of the shelved prototypes, she said, developed concepts and code that were folded into other, continuing projects.
“We’re absolutely shutting things down,” Ms. Beer said. “We’re not afraid to shut things down. We don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think it’s a smart thing.”
Mr. McAfee, the M.I.T. research scientist, agreed.
“It’s not surprising that early A.I. efforts are falling short,” said Mr. McAfee, who is a founder of Workhelix, an A.I.-consulting firm. “Innovation is a process of failing fairly regularly.”
A good interview:
If you have an hour, listen to this really great interview with Richard Granat, who has been involved in legal technology since the dot-com days:
Till next time. Stay chill out there.
Well, had to make and edit because I pasted "Till next time. Stay chill out there" in the wrong section.