Comment by freefaler
12 hours ago
The price of their work will go down and it might not be economical to do it at all. Theirs skills (as also many IT skills) will not be needed at that scale. In the same way as typing on a typewriter was a skill that gave economic opportunity not so long time ago. Now everything is an email and part of it is speech to text. When something becomes a commodity, the skilled providers need to find something new to sell on the market.
About the law firms, part of the job of a law firm is to give the corporate employee a "guarantee" that he won't be held accountable for doing something legally stupid. So a new lawyer is at great disadvantage if he don't have the contact he has build trust with. From a freind's law company with 50+ lawyers I know that junior lawyers fresh from uni need at least 4-5 years to build their client base. Then, they can leave and start their own taking part of that client base with them. This limits the number of people who can start their own company and most of them won't risk it in the age of AI, because it will be sales and marketing that will feed them, not their legal wizardry, especially when tasks like "check this agreement" won't be billed at the current insane rates.
Law firms are already limited by sales and marketing, and I believe the concept of ‘legal wizardry’ is misplaced. There’s almost nothing one law firm can do that another couldn’t do just as well. The only thing clients want are the ‘you don’t get fired for buying IBM’ factor and asking ‘how high’ when they say jump. The first is all based on cultivating an image and that’s just marketing and sales, and the second is just pure workaholic-fueled hustle.
Great example. Typewriter skill is computer typing skill. You no longer have to return the carriage. The typing is the same. It's not obsolete.