Clients and law firms will continue to navigate the ever more choppy waters of the cost of legal services and the influence of artificial intelligence on their relationships. Clients have done an excellent job leading law firms toward more efficiency and lower costs. Some law firms have taken the lead. The effort to find the sweet spot in a fee arrangement will continue. We have some suggestions. But now the separate subject of how the two sides will handle artificial intelligence intersects with questions of fee structures to implicate how results will be achieved and at what cost.
We benefit from being both client and counsel and having over 50 years of experience managing the industries' progress toward fairness and equity in achieving each side's goals.
Artificial intelligence has a significant impact on the delivery of legal services. It is in neither its infancy nor its maturity. But it already proves its breathtaking accuracy and speed in delivering results, including finding and digesting documents and creating memoranda and briefs, including citations to relevant legal authorities. And at least one study shows it is more accurate than human beings. In a word, it is here, and it works. Well, two words.
Clients want to control the cost of legal services. Lawyers should be able to provide reasonable estimates, even for litigation (we do), and then set ceilings with incentives for over or under-runs or no exceptions. Fixed prices should be used. Value-added bonuses can be used to exceed expectations on results, cost savings, or both. Clients will insist on these pricing arrangements. Gone are the days when the law firm assigns associates to work the case doing the labor-intensive grunt work. Artificial intelligence does it faster and much cheaper. Clients can even pull that effort in-house before they turn the results over to the outside lawyer. Clients will ensure their senior partner knows how to use artificial intelligence.
Many reasonable lawyers have joined a big firm for the support they need from many young associates. Prominent law firm leaders are building a pyramid with increasingly overpriced neophyte lawyers billing extraordinarily insane hours to enhance firm profits. Artificial intelligence eliminates most of that paradigm. Clients will not pay for those worker bees. Nor will the clients pay for them to do legal research. Clients will go to the seasoned lawyer, make sure she has and knows how to use the artificial intelligence tools, and insist that the lawyer use the tools. The seasoned lawyer must be the one anyway who knows how to craft the search commands and scrutinize the results.
Big law firms will lose some of their luster and must reorganize to adjust to the client demands brought to bear by artificial intelligence. The best and the brightest may strike out independently with their new support system. Newly minted lawyers may also hang out their own shingles based on their knowledge of artificial intelligence. Law schools will adjust their curriculum to train students to use artificial intelligence.
It's a bright new day for legal services. One fallout of the advent of artificial intelligence is that seasoned lawyers can practice solo, reduce the cost, and increase the value of the services based on their ability to spend time on the merits of the case and by assigning computers to do the grunt work.
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