re: Anyone else wondering if they make it to retirement b/c of AI?

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I have been practicing law for 25 years and have tons of work product, know how to craft effective prompts and quickly spot issues and refine with more prompts, and I have the "pro" etc versions of all the major platforms + CoCounsel. It is scary what this shite can do. But the really freaky part is how much it has improved in the past few months.

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I’m in a similar boat with about a decade less experience and generally agree. I’m in-house and what I’ve noticed is that, at the moment, AI is an incredibly useful productivity tool.

For example, I can prompt chatGPT to write up a quick notice of material breach for an unpaid invoice referencing a certain order form and MSA. Meanwhile, I’ve got Claude redlining a vendor’s ToS against our playbook in the background. Of course, I still spot check for correct dates and titles, section references, and the various hallucinations now and then. These tools have allowed me to do the work of 10 people and do it so much faster.

Who knows how long it will last, but I think before outright replacement, there will be a period of augmentation/supplementation where instead of a legal team of 20, you have a legal team of 5-6 doing the majority of things.

The 2 biggest hindrances to full blown adoptions I’ve encountered are 1) security/privacy concerns around data retention and training. Understandably, corporations are concerned about putting sensitive or proprietary information into a third party AI tool; and 2) the majority of my colleagues are either too lazy or scared to learn AI, even just basic prompting. It has allowed me to run circles around them and further supports my point above that essentially lawyers who use AI will replace lawyers who don’t, until AI eventually gobbles us all up.