Legal services delivery: Difference between revisions

The learned authors seem to recognise that legal work involving sophisticated real-time reaction to emerging legal quandaries, is (or, in the good old days, ''was'') less ''mune'' to the “march of the [[chatbot]]s” — [[A&O]] raked a fair few millions cranking out [[CDO]]s, after all — but their insight, wholly unrecognisable though it may be, to those us at the coalface, is that ''it’s all changed now''. [[This time is different]].  

It’s like we’ve somehow solved the game; that there are no mysteries left: one can only now create “legal worth” by supersizing, adding fries, or getting the delivery guy to go faster for less money. ''It’s not about the [[pizza]]''.

But here is the thing. It ''is'' about the [[pizza]].

The marginal return on any activity is not a function of how intrinsically ''clever'', but on how ''difficult'' it is. It is ''not'' difficult to do clever things with a computer: all you need is a computer — and maybe a Java coder from Bucharest you found on ''UpWork''. But if you can do it, so can anyone ''else'' if they get themselves a computer and an account on ''UpWork''. Computers are cheap. Romanian Java coders are cheap. Seeing as that “anyone else” will be a competitor of yours, once you have figured out how to make it with a computer, and paid your Java guy, the marginal value of your [[pizza]] will equal its marginal cost of production — that is to say, ''nil''. This will happen not just gradually, over a period of time, but ''immediately''. Ask Kodak.<ref>Kodak ''invented'' the digital camera. It still killed them.</ref> Ask people who used to make postcards and aerogrammes.

If you think there is a money to be made delivering a valueless product [[cheapest to deliver|more cheaply than any other bugger]], you will find yourself in a very fast race to the bottom of a very large tank, with a very hard, very flat, very concrete floor.

The point about real legal work is that you ''can’t'' get a computer to do it. If you could, ''it wouldn’t be legal work''.<ref>I could pause here to pick a fight with the Susskind clan, but it would spoil the flow. But the essence of the argument is this: what counts as legal work is inherently dynamic. It changes through time. It is a function of non-linear interactions in complex systems. What counts as legal work is not just hard to predict ahead of time: it is ''impossible''.</ref>  Legal work is — always has been — about edge cases; conundrums; things no-one expected. Bespoke situations spinning out of non-contiguities and interactions between moving parts that no-one expected to move. To be sure, part of a lawyer’s job should be to identify those parts of the ecosystem than ''can'' be tamed, and to prepare the land for farming: to commoditise new products, productionise them, and hand them off to operations teams who ''can'' make widgets out of them — but ''lawyers don’t make widgets''. Lawyers are ''bushwhackers''. Lawyers are ''pioneers''.