I thought this article (LawGeex Founders Launch Superlegal NewMod Firm) on Artificial Lawyer yesterday was super interesting for a few reasons:
-
It's an AI law firm which has just launched in America, but is focused on construction as a use case. That's an area that we've had quite a lot to do with, more in the use case of drafting contracts rather than reviewing them, which has always seemed to be a gap.
-
Late last month, I also went to a seminar that David Wilkie was presenting about the NZS 3910 construction contract, which is heavily used here in New Zealand. It's been recently updated, but law firms in particular are still drafting a lot of special conditions. The seminar was pointing out that a lot of those special conditions are, firstly, quite unfair, probably unnecessary, and also quite hard and expensive to find. Any solution that can address those sorts of issues efficiently would be quite well received, I would think.
It was really interesting scrolling down the article and seeing that Superlegal is offering a 24-hour turnaround for as low as $117 per contract, with the licenced attorney signing off on every review. Now, it's hard to imagine that you could go much lower than that, or why you should need to really, given the value of construction contracts and everything that can go wrong on them. I think there's a lot of upside for the clients if they can get a good contract review, even at a higher price point than that. In fact, I would probably argue that $117 may be the base, and it would be a really useful exercise from there on to be able to look at how would you then be able to then add more value into what you do, so instead of offering the base level of service for $117, what more could you do that clients would be happy to pay more for? I think it's probably quite a lot.
I also thought it was quite interesting that they deliberately referenced the attorneys that are charging $500 an hour, and it reminded me of a conversation that I had with a construction lawyer several years ago now about whether we might collaborate in creating an automated version of one of the main construction sub-contracts used heavily here in New Zealand. I thought she'd be super keen because it aligned really well with the client base that she had, but her response was along the lines that “my hourly rate is $500 an hour, and if a client doesn't see the value of paying me $500 an hour, then that's not a client that I want”.
I think if this is the way things are heading, which it clearly is, it's going to be a really big challenge for firms like that, that can't see that there is another way of being able to do this. I do think there is an opportunity to explore - while some might go in at that lowest level, what can you do that would be an even more valuable service that clients will want to pay for, rather than finding more and more people competing at that very bottom end.
