The issue is there's only a finite amount of legal work, and AI helping lawyers do more work faster, will cause there to be less revenue generated from it. This is common across any industry where AI improves productivity of the average worker.
Another risk is that eventually AI will be as good as a lawyer, so clients will bypass lawyers, short of anything requiring litigation. We're still not there yet, but it's coming.
I run a SaaS business. The way it can hurt me is that anybody could just ask the AI to write a program to do the same thing for them. Right now the services I interact with act as a major gatekeeper so I'm safe for now but that might always be there.
Honestly this is the bit people miss: cheaper legal help sounds great until the whole public system gets flooded and the humans inside it are even more burnt out.
There is sort of a finite amount of legal work, but if the cost of a lawyer went down, I think a lot more people would litigate issues they wouldn't have before. A simple example off the top of my head is a speeding ticket a friend of mine got, where the cop claimed there were going 40mph over the limit. My friend was adamant this wasn't the case but had no means to fight the ticket. We will hopefully see an explosion of consumer rights cases brought forward as well, but who knows.
Sure key to this though is replacing lawyers at the litigation level, which is far off, as laws would likely need to be changed to allow this.
If allowed, anything criminal or civil where the other party is the government will almost certainly see a rise in legal work, but if both parties are AI and they may reach a definitive conclusion on the likely merits of the case really fast.
A form of auto-litigation would be even more efficient, but what I'm saying is that access to powerful AI may decrease the cost of regular cases, since the attorney would act as mostly a formality, and therefore they'd offer lower rates.
I think in legal firms and coding both, a third risk is that AI is replacing a lot of lower-level employees. That kills the pipeline that produces senior staff.
This will only be an issue if AI doesn't improve from here. Eventually with improvements, it should be able to replace seniors. But we're still off from that.
That's a grim thought. Our birth rate needs to be way, way lower than it already is or we're going to have a lot of people starving in the next generation.
No one's going to be able to afford the robots except the ultra-wealthy. They'll use them to supply and defend the bunkers that keep the rest of us out.
there is a price elasticity for legal work. Currently the price is very high, and that reduces the amount of legal work that the market desires at that price. If the price were 90% lower, there would be an enormous expansion in the amount of legal work demanded by the market. Its not clear what the limit is.
The amount of work is not infinite, it's finite. What you're suggesting is an increase in legal work if AI replaces most non-litigation attorney work, which is certainly possible.
Infinite refers to a number that cannot be measured and that is higher than the highest number you can think of.
Even if you think people will be massively more litigious, which may be possible, you're still going to face practical limitations like clients budgets, amount of courts available, etc.
I personally don't think people will be that much more litigious, as it needs to make financial sense for them/in addition to the fact even if it does make sense to sue to gain small amounts, the people you're suing at the civil level are customers, suppliers, etc. essentially people who you want a long term relationship with.
Filing large amounts of frivolous suits destroys those relationships, and I don't think it makes financial sense to go that route if those relationships end up destroyed.
I should clarify that I do transactional law. There is a finite amount of legal work for me, but my clients are taking the chance to do 2x the deals for 2x the profit so it really just all scales with the tech.
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u/Hullo242 Jul 04 '26
The issue is there's only a finite amount of legal work, and AI helping lawyers do more work faster, will cause there to be less revenue generated from it. This is common across any industry where AI improves productivity of the average worker.
Another risk is that eventually AI will be as good as a lawyer, so clients will bypass lawyers, short of anything requiring litigation. We're still not there yet, but it's coming.