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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A lot of well paid lawyers on this thread. But reminder: No one on earth makes more money than successful business owners. The super rich don't get that way because someone is paying them a salary. They get rich from owning businesses that become incredibly valuable. [/quote]

Very true.

Lawyers do, however, know how to read something, identify relevance, and respond accordingly.

You keep harping on business owners having a better chance of becoming “super rich”. No sh$t. It’s an entirely different risk-reward calculus: exponentially more absolute failures, proportionally much less likely to be a moderately successful low-level millionaire, and a slightly greater but still infinitesimally small likelihood of becoming “super rich”.

In any case, that’s not at all the subject of this thread, so I don’t know why you keep posting different variations of the same statement.

Oh wait, yes I do. Envy and insecurity.

[/quote]

PP here. This was actually the only post I wrote. I think you're confusing me with someone else who doesn't think being a lawyer would be incredibly boring. I'm not jealous. I own a TON of Nvidia stock I bought ten years ago so honestly I'm probably a lot wealthier than you. [/quote]

It is hard to hold Nvidia for 10 years...so man ups-and-downs...you have some fortitude to hold.  I was lucky that my kid who knows AI casually mentioned to me 18 months ago that he thought Open AI's new release may actually be something so buy Nvidia as a way to play it.  What a ride since then.

I agree with you and I find the entire DC / BigLaw mentality to just be so silly.  It reminds me of the scene in the Social Network when Sean Parker says "$1MM is not cool"...at which point the BigLaw partner would stand up and say "heck yeah it's cool" and walk out of the meeting.

I travel a ton to SFO and work with start-ups and the environment is electrifying and optimistic and people dream and think big...and DC BigLaw is all about just grinding to earn your $2MM per year.

FWIW, I know several BigLaw partners and NONE want their kids to follow in their path...a large part of that is because they know generative AI will be disruptive, because their own firms are figuring out how to incorporate it to make their lives richer, but cut down on the number of pesky associates.  Anything to improve profits-per-partner baby![/quote]

They think reducing the number of associates is going to improve profits per partner?  Do they not know how law firm profitability works?  You need those associates billing hours to get those profits.  No associates, no billable hours, no profits.[/quote]

Believe me...they are figuring out how to maintain or raise billings and reduce their associates.  They are also starting to experiment with fixed contracts / fixed monthly billings.

I always found BigLaw to be a weird antagonistic business model...partners seem to kind of despise most of their associates.  Also the weird dynamic of partners not receiving any benefits from the firm, but all the associates and staff do...and again, they kind of despise staff for having to pay for those benefits.[/quote]

Law firms have been trying out different billing arrangements for years.  I started my legal career in biglaw over 20 years ago and they were saying back then that there were going to transition off the billable hour.  It's never really worked.

I'm in house now.  From what I've seen of AI so far, I'm very skeptical it can be very useful for anything other than pretty menial tasks.  It produces professional-looking products, but the products are wrong more often than they are right.  It's actually a big problem in my view because the documents look very convincing even though they have huge errors in them,  But if it turns out that AI can do the work of the associates, then there is no need to hire these firms in the first place.  I will just buy the software myself.  Why would I pay a biglaw partner $1500 an hour to run software?  [/quote]

You realize your company and your department will start paying for customized LLMs that are attuned to your industry and your work.  You won't just sign up for ChatGPT...you will employ a "custom ChatGPT" where you and the company will start populating the LLMs with correct data.  As you train those custom models, it will be right far more than wrong.

Also, ChatGPT can spit out an entire brief in like 60 seconds...it is easier to edit and fact-check the work vs. creating the brief by a human.

If your company has any sense, you will start reducing your use of outside law firms.  You won't pay a BigLaw partner $1500/hour to run software, you will use that partner for just the high-value/high-complexity work, obviously for any trials, etc.
[/quote]

We’ve tried out a number of these products already.  The work product looks pretty but actually sucks.  It may get better in the future, but I’m not impressed so far.[/quote]

It doesn't sound like you have, or you wouldn't say "we tried out a number of these products"...because these products would involve many months of training the LLMs to your business and your department needs.  Sounds like your company or your department is trying to use something off-the-shelf...do you have any in-house Machine Learning or LLM-trained developers even doing any customization?
[/quote]

I don't think they spent months training them and they were not custom built.  I'm no AI expert.  If it's true that these tools are only good when they are customized on a particular company's or department's data, then that makes my point even more that these tools aren't going to be driving up profits-per-partner at law firms.  Each company would be buying and training the models for themselves, and law firms would get cut out of the equation.[/quote]

Except a BigLaw firm is going to train their LLM for a wide number of practices.  Your company may be involved say with lots of environmental compliance stuff in the oil & gas industry, so maybe you stop outsourcing some of the low-level compliance work to BigLaw.

However, your company probably only does one acquisition per year, or maybe only raises 3rd party capital every couple of years...there are lots of things requiring legal help that aren't core to your business and you will probably hire Skadden that does 1,000 M&A deals per year.

You are correct that it could impact Skadden's profits...Skadden can't just keep with the tons of associates model, when Kravath decides they can do the work faster and cheaper (not lower rate, but fewer hours) because they know how to leverage Generative AI.  It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out in the legal industry.[/quote]

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