Rethinking legal education in the AI era

I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit. It was all codex and claude, using the cli agents to write the "import docx" scripts that wrote all the filings, and scripts to assemble exhibits. I don't know how long the bars will be able to hold onto their monopoly powers when confronted with LLMs that are measurably superior.

> From what I've seen, the top AI models can now produce contracts that are on par with what I would have had to pay thousands of dollars for a decade ago

How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it.

> you still run everything by a real attorney of course for the accountability piece

Your attorney can make better use of AI than you can. A growing time sink for lawyers (and I assume, physicians) is having to explain to clients that "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you," and "no, that's not actually how X works in practice."

I've seen lawyers lose to non-lawyers who didn't use all that, just because the lawyers didn't do their work, thinking, no doubt, "I'm a lawyer I will just win", at any rate there is a well known aphorism that a lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client.

finally, was this thing you beat the actual lawyer at in their specific specialty, since lawyers are often focused on particular aspects of the law?

> How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it.

I ran multiple businesses for over 20 years, and during that time had to deal with countless contracts involving commercial transactions, leases, funding events and employment. I worked closely with outside counsel, and had to deal with numerous disputes and lawsuits.

Many contracts are boilerplate to begin with, which is why firms like Cooley and Orrick provide free document libraries and generators. They know that a huge segment of the people who might retain them aren't going to pay $10,000 for an NDA or a simple commercial contract. So they give documents away as a marketing tool, hoping that it might get them more complex work in the future.

Attorneys can add value when you have a unique wrinkle and of course when there's a dispute, but, as an example, if you need an employment contract for California, you don't need to pay someone $500/hour to draft one from scratch and frankly for many contract categories, you'd probably be taking on more risk by having a bespoke contract drafted than modifying a solid, widely-used template.

> Your attorney can make better use of AI than you can. A growing time sink for lawyers (and I assume, physicians) is having to explain to clients that "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you," and "no, that's not actually how X works in practice."

You're not wrong, but I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying.

First, as far as contracts are concerned, the leading AIs are more than capable of producing pretty decent ones for many categories because they've been trained against all the real contracts that are out there. Your "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you but..." scenario is real, but it applies less and less than attorneys want to believe, especially when the subject is mundane.

Second, the bigger issue is that AI is fundamentally hindering the development of the next generation of lawyers. It's great that senior associates and partners can use AI to be more efficient, but the economic pressures AI creates mean that it's far harder for law firms to have clients subsidize the training of the next generation of lawyers.

So the question isn't whether an experienced attorney today can make better use of AI than you can, it's whether a new attorney today will be able to become a "good" lawyer when AI is eroding their firms' ability to have clients subsidize their training.

> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet.

Yes they were. Educators have been talking about how access to the internet has affected their students learning since forever. We were cautioned and had dedicated classes to teach us to be critical of different sources, teaching us what Wikipedia could and could not be used for. The internet was deliberately turned off for our exams.

Crypto too was seen as culturally important, papers were written by otherwise well respected authors. We were expected to read some whitepapers about crypto. Interestingly, reading those papers only made us more sure it was a scam.

You're rewriting history to make this moment seem different, it is not.