Why AI Might Actually Create More Work for Lawyers
Episode
55 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Productivity, Relationships, Design & UX
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Jevons Paradox in Legal Pricing: When AI reduced a large-scale trust agreement review project by 70%, a client who previously declined the work at the original price immediately approved it at the lower cost. Revenue went from zero to $3M. Lower per-unit legal costs will likely generate more total legal work, not less, preserving overall firm revenue.
- ✓AI as Thought Partner, Not Just Efficiency Tool: Beyond automating document review, AI tools like Claude allow senior lawyers to test novel structures, stress-test theories, and iterate on ideas. A tax partner uses Claude to prototype international family office structures, then assigns an associate to verify the output — producing results neither human nor AI would reach independently.
- ✓Patent Quality Validation by Clients: Lowenstein Sandler's patent team used AI drafting tools for six months and received unsolicited client feedback that application quality had measurably improved. One client also reported a fourfold increase in internal invention submissions from engineers, directly expanding the volume of patent prosecution work the firm receives.
- ✓Security Layer Is the Core Value of Legal AI Platforms: Using consumer-grade Claude or ChatGPT for client matters can inadvertently waive attorney-client privilege. Platforms like Harvey and Legora add enterprise security, internet-isolated sessions, and retrieval-augmented generation fine-tuned on legal content — making them the compliant choice over direct frontier model access for any billable client work.
- ✓Hourly Rates Rising Despite AI Efficiency Gains: Average hourly rates at large US law firms rose 10.1% in 2025 against roughly 3% CPI, with top-20 most profitable firms rising even more. The explanation: billable hours have become more productive per unit through AI, making each hour more valuable even as total hours per matter decline.
What It Covers
Gary Wingans, chair of 400-lawyer firm Lowenstein Sandler, examines how AI tools like Harvey and Claude are reshaping legal work — compressing costs by up to 70% on document review, expanding the volume of viable legal matters, and shifting junior lawyer roles away from grunt work toward higher-level analysis.
Key Questions Answered
- •Jevons Paradox in Legal Pricing: When AI reduced a large-scale trust agreement review project by 70%, a client who previously declined the work at the original price immediately approved it at the lower cost. Revenue went from zero to $3M. Lower per-unit legal costs will likely generate more total legal work, not less, preserving overall firm revenue.
- •AI as Thought Partner, Not Just Efficiency Tool: Beyond automating document review, AI tools like Claude allow senior lawyers to test novel structures, stress-test theories, and iterate on ideas. A tax partner uses Claude to prototype international family office structures, then assigns an associate to verify the output — producing results neither human nor AI would reach independently.
- •Patent Quality Validation by Clients: Lowenstein Sandler's patent team used AI drafting tools for six months and received unsolicited client feedback that application quality had measurably improved. One client also reported a fourfold increase in internal invention submissions from engineers, directly expanding the volume of patent prosecution work the firm receives.
- •Security Layer Is the Core Value of Legal AI Platforms: Using consumer-grade Claude or ChatGPT for client matters can inadvertently waive attorney-client privilege. Platforms like Harvey and Legora add enterprise security, internet-isolated sessions, and retrieval-augmented generation fine-tuned on legal content — making them the compliant choice over direct frontier model access for any billable client work.
- •Hourly Rates Rising Despite AI Efficiency Gains: Average hourly rates at large US law firms rose 10.1% in 2025 against roughly 3% CPI, with top-20 most profitable firms rising even more. The explanation: billable hours have become more productive per unit through AI, making each hour more valuable even as total hours per matter decline.
Notable Moment
Malpractice insurers at Lloyd's of London reversed their position on AI within two years — shifting from asking whether firms were exposing themselves by using AI tools, to asking whether firms were creating risk by failing to use them at all.
Episode Transcript
Now a message from Meta. Meta is launching America's Workforce Academy. The program offers paid training, a job, and a path to America's future because the future is for everyone. Learn more at meta.com/america's workforce academy. The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced cost by millions, slashed repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, risk can affect multiple parts of the organization at once, from property and liability to cyber and regulatory challenges. At that level, managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline. At the Hartford, the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive. And when losses do happen, that work is paired with insurance coverage shaped by years of underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience. Learn more at the hartford.com/riskmitigation. Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wiesenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. So, Tracy, I think, like, maybe a year and a half ago, we did that episode with, Joel Wertheimer talking about AI and law. It does feel like law specifically is one of those areas where it's very easy for the normal person to imagine how AI could be very disruptive. Would you say that's fair? Yes. I would say, however and full disclaimer. So my husband used to be a lawyer, a corporate lawyer. I would say that, like, standardized forms and templates have existed in the legal profession for many, many years. True. And law has also gone through many, many technological revolutions. So we've gone from, like, scriveners. Do you know that term? Scriveners Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To, like, keyboardists. Totally. The advent of, like, typist was supposed to be this massive hit for or not a hit, but, like, this massive deal for the legal industry. And everything ended up, like, navigating through it pretty much. I guess they probably each one of those waves, there probably was some extreme period of anxiety about disruption and how would billing still happen. And, of course, one of the questions that comes to mind in the legal profession is like, why would the lawyers wanna reduce the number of hours that they can, you know, do on a case given that famously they're paid by the hour? I think, actually aren't they, like, paid by the ten minutes, technically? Sometimes. Yeah. But it does feel like regard so maybe, like, I'm not saying and …
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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode
SignalCast may earn commission on purchases via these links.
Tools
by Anthropic
“AI tools like Harvey and Claude are reshaping legal work... AI tools like Claude allow senior lawyers to test novel structures, stress-test theories, and iterate on ideas.”
by OpenAI
“Using consumer-grade Claude or ChatGPT for client matters can inadvertently waive attorney-client privilege.”
“Gary Wingans, chair of 400-lawyer firm Lowenstein Sandler, examines how AI tools like Harvey and Claude are reshaping legal work — compressing costs by up to 70% on document review.”
“Platforms like Harvey and Legora add enterprise security, internet-isolated sessions, and retrieval-augmented generation fine-tuned on legal content.”
company
“Gary Wingans, chair of 400-lawyer firm Lowenstein Sandler, examines how AI tools like Harvey and Claude are reshaping legal work.”
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