What is an “AI?”
You know what really pisses me off? It's how many different technologies we've put under the "ai umbrella," but the annoying part is that it's not technically wrong. It makes the likelihood of someone mistaking ai in vacuum cleaners with ai in medicine to be of the same quality. AI has become a marketing band aid for every quarterly goal. Look at this mit article, it promises ai to "speak objects into existence." Low and behold the only function of ai was a glorified Boolean replacement to interpret natural language.
I think that's what everyone is missing; ai is such a game changer because it can improve everything. Jenson Huang recently said that when Nvidia researched Alexnet and the advancements that it made for image recognition, Nvidia realized the underlying methodology was not just limited to image recognition. While consumer facing ai is very new, Nvidia gave open ai one of the only chips from a multi billion dollar project to openai well before anyone had heard of chat gpt. The only innovation about ai in the last decade is that it can scale with compute resources.
Moore's law has allowed ai a chance, because no one expected everyone to have data center level supercomputers in their pockets. What people don't realize about Moore's law is that you can also look at the price of compute halves in value. The abs system on your car brakes has more compute than what took us to the moon.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/2025/mit-researchers-speak-objects-existence-using-ai-robotics-1205
Billable Hours No More?
It seems more likely that the standard billing rate for these tasks will be decreased instead of ridding the entire system of billing hours. Some areas of law like divorce cases are not allowed to have outcome based compensation for attorneys.
The system I have set up for our clients is to calculate the amount of hours each task is worth in our local jurisdiction. As more firms use ai, the time for each task will decrease but will still allow the clients to work within the model rules by not charging an unreasonable rate for tasks.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-goodbye-to-billable-hours-cba198fe
Joe Rogan and AI
About 40 minutes into this interview, Jensen Huang talks about how ai has effected REAL JOBS. One of the foundational researchers of ai predicted that radiologists would lose their jobs since ai is better at reading the x-rays. However, what actually happened was that radiology jobs increased over that time. AI was not replacing the radiologist, is was making an individual task more efficient and accurate.
I think we need to look at the law industry in a similar light. It's not replacing the lawyer, it's not holding depositions, or implementing strategy, or the million other hats lawyers wear. But it can be really good at speeding up discovery while reducing errors just like AI did for radiology.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hptKYix4X8