Why AI Might Actually Create More Work for Lawyers

**Gary Wingens** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:23)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:24)
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?

**Tracy Alloway** (0:44)
Yes. I would say however, and full disclaimer, so my husband used to be a lawyer, a corporate lawyer.
I would say that standardized forms and templates have existed in the legal profession for many, many years. And law has also gone through many, many technological revolutions. So we've gone from like Scriveners, do you know the term? Scriveners?

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:06)
To like keyboardists. Totally. The advent of like typists 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.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:19)
I guess they probably at 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, well, why would the lawyers want to reduce the number of hours that they can do on a case given that famously they're paid by the hour? I think actually, aren't they like paid by the 10 minutes technically?

**Tracy Alloway** (1:45)
Sometimes, yeah.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:46)
But it does feel like, so maybe like, I'm not saying and I don't even have an intuition per se that AI would like upend like or reduce the amount of legal work that needs to get done. But those technological revolutions that you mentioned in the past probably did change the industry quite a bit. So regardless of like total employment or job prospects, etc.
It feels inevitable that change is going to come. At one point, it was probably like a skill to be able to know case law or know how to search LexisNexis. Like that almost certainly is going to change.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:16)
So one thing I've been thinking about, and this gets into the productivity debate, is I'm starting to come around to the idea of a Jevons Paradox in just general bureaucracy, basically. So you already have AI that's like being used by insurance companies to push back against claims. And then you have claimants using AI to then push back against the insurance companies. And I feel like the future could just be a bunch of bots, like talking to each other and filing different claims. And I guess we will dispute.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:47)
And then humans still have to sort it all out at the end.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:49)
Yeah, and maybe we won't get more productive. I don't know.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:52)
Other people said this, a lot of people like in tech coding, all of these computer jobs, right now, a lot of people seem to feel very stressed and overworked. I don't think you look at a situation, someone who has a job that primarily involves on their computer, is like, oh, I'm feeling like I'm really, I have it easy these days, everyone feels very stressed. But anyway, I'm very interested in this topic. There was a big story several months ago, one of the major law firms, Kirkland and Ellis, talking about building out more in-house infrastructure. So I think it's a good time to sort of get a state of the market of like, okay, like we're almost four years into the post-Chat GPT world.
Where do we actually stand in terms of what AI could do for legal work, and then also just like how it's changing the profession, if at all.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:42)
Yeah, let's do it.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:43)
All right. I'm very excited to say, we do in fact have the perfect guest.
Someone who's been talking a lot about this, someone who's written about this topic, someone who is at a very substantial law firm where you can actually see some of this taking place in real time. We're going to be speaking with Gary Wingens. He's the chair of Lowenstein Sandler. Gary, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

**Gary Wingens** (4:03)
Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Joe Weisenthal** (4:05)
Just to set the scene, why don't you give us a little bit of an idea of what the firm is, how big it is, your role there, and what kind of work gets done there.