https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/lawyers-flood-tech-expo-wondering-is-ai-about-devalue-their-time-2026-03-12/The future of the billable hour was a burning question at the LegalWeek conference in New York this week, where artificial intelligence is dominating the annual legal technology gathering.Will an efficiency explosion fueled by AI leave clients unwilling to pay lawyers hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour? Will law firms charge even more but offer different services? How will firms absorb the costs of AI tools that clients are now demanding?“These things are expensive,” said Martha Louks, a technology director at law firm McDermott Will & Schulte, in a panel discussion on AI's impact on attorneys' work and what they charge. “We are going to be burning through tokens,” she said, using the industry term for the small chunks of text AI systems process and bill for.About 7,000 lawyers, tech executives, computer scientists and marketers jostled for space on an exhibition floor at the Javits Center. Legal AI firms and startups demonstrated software that can search through libraries of legal documents in the time it takes a lawyer to send an email, draft and revamp contracts, or uncover trends affecting a law firm’s clients and suggest a marketing pitch.One of the participants, Swedish startup Legora, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $550 million to expand in the U.S., reaching a $5.5 billion valuation. Vendors handed out swag, from plushies and golf balls to sunglasses, branded with names like Billables.AI and Litify. (Reuters parent company Thomson Reuters, which also owns legal AI platform CoCounsel, was among the participants.)
In a conference room above the exhibit hall, Oliver Roberts, who teaches at Washington University School of Law and manages a small AI-focused law firm, said AI “will 100% replace lawyers in the future.” There was nervous laughter in the audience.A legal AI consultant Oz Benamram predicted at another meeting that in three years, companies would use AI to do half of the work they now pay law firms to do.“Companies want fast results,” he said — though he also said clients would pay $10,000 an hour for human lawyers whose judgment AI can’t match. Other presenters said as AI automation speeds up routine legal tasks, law firms could use their extra time to offer more bespoke, complex advisory services.Attorneys and product reps had to be turned away from some meeting rooms due to overcapacity, including a workshop by legal and compliance company Epiq for lawyers to learn how to create their own AI “agents." Most participants were quickly vibe-coding bots to analyze contracts or scour court websites, while some struggled to get past the login screen.A talk on “strategic legal leadership in the age of AI” became standing room-only before event staff finally barred the doors. Dozens of people still stood in line trying to get in — possibly hoping to pitch their firms or products to the Microsoft, GSK, HSBC and Barclays executives who were presenting.Some participants acknowledged the stress of trying to adopt such fast-changing technology or to beat others to market. No one said they thought it was slowing down, or that AI was being overhyped.Two years ago, law firms had to promise their clients that they weren’t using generative AI on their cases, Susan Wortzman, a partner at Canadian law firm McCarthy Tetrault told a roomful of attendees.“Now they are saying you must use it,” she said.
My son, the lawyer!
>>1497076no they shouldn't lol. Using AI in a lawsuit will absolutely fuck you over; they don't know what is real or fake and will hallucinate citations.
THE FIRST THING WE DO IS, BOT ALL THE LAWYERS
>pay lawyer $1000/hr>lawyer uses ai effectively and reduces total time spent on my case>law office can now take on more casesWtf is the complaint here?
>>1497230They can bypass the lawyers entirely and have AI be the paralegals.
>>1497250>have AI be the paralegals.lmao good luck with that.
>>1497251>In a conference room above the exhibit hall, Oliver Roberts, who teaches at Washington University School of Law and manages a small AI-focused law firm, said AI “will 100% replace lawyers in the future.” There was nervous laughter in the audience.>A legal AI consultant Oz Benamram predicted at another meeting that in three years, companies would use AI to do half of the work they now pay law firms to do.
>>1497076Pay up…
>>1497252It's fucking delusional lmao. AI consistently fucks up anything to do with legal cases. Multiple people have lost cases and are facing being disbarred because they used AI to write briefs and it hallucinated to make fake citations. There's a reason the main people trying to convince you that AI is the future are the people who have heavy personal investment in it.
>>1497230The AI will make shit the fuck up, citing cases and precedents that do not exist. It's a real good look for the judge.
>>1497424Oh well. Law is mostly horseshit run out of control.
>>1497425you're projecting else shill
>>1497426>else shilllol
In all the cases where AI has been used so far, the AI did such a laughably bad job that the judges have thrown the cases out
>>1497425This isn't inaccurate. The law has been off the rails for decades, giving preferential treatment to corporate traitors selling our first world countries for peanuts. The AI companies will have this shit refined in five years and ready for full replacement, which is actually half as long as it takes a new crop of people to go to Law School and then join the Virginia Bar.More importantly, people would rather trust the AI even if its objectively wrong half of the time, because their primary concern is their perceived enemies not having any power, not the integrity of the rulings. If you start using AI lawyers, you can at least be sure that its not socialists/conservatives/men/women/boomers/zoomers or whatever group you particularly hate making legal decisions - everyone will agree that the machine is preferable to their polar opposite group getting anything they want. We will, as they say, cut our noses off to spite ourselves.If there were any chance of the legal system remaining in the hands of humans they'd have listened to the majority and banned browns from the nation, stopped listening to danger hairs and LGBT, and instituted laws to stop the draining of equity from the Middle Class by now, but there isn't and they haven't. At this point its fine to toss it all out for disingenuous rulings that at least aren't done by people rooting for the destruction of the nation. Its not perfect but its what we've got.
>>1497434im not reading all that esl shill it hurts my brain
>>1497434>Screeching about browns againJesus christ dude go outside.
>>1497076It can replace a lot of low-level paralegals training to be lawyers and allow them to reduce workforce to a minimal level.It will never replace lawyers. The idea that it ever could is based on a false assumption: that the law is actually what matters. Spoilers - it doesn't. Cases aren't decided on what the law is or what it says; they're decided by judges. Not even juries the vast majority of the time; the judge decides every parameter of the trial and what the jury gets to see, hear, and even 'guides' them on what their thought process is supposed to be in jury instructions.The day that AI replaces judges is the day that AI can replace lawyers and we already have movies about that.Last thought - Criminal Justice is an "art" not a "science." The arguments have to not just be based on a legal technicality; they have to be compelling and convincing arguments. A human judge is pretty much never going to be moved by AI generated slop unless/until they replace them all with retarded zoomers that actually believe AI is omniscient.
>>1497493It's filled with browns now.
>>1497493Just stop being brown. Then nobody will have to screech about you being brown.
The only reason party B needs a lawyer is because party A has one. They've been an occupation entirely composed of useless parasites from the very beginning- and ultimately that's why they're here to stay. Nearly all politicians and judges are former lawyers, why would they kill their great golden tick that allows them to suck the blood of the innocent for 10k/hour?
>AI literally invents fake cases and laws and writes fictionThe real problem is that courts are so backwards and unfriendly to lay people that self-representation means the judge executes you for not filing perfectly formatted motions with ten pages of case law analysis attached to it.
>>1497255t. soon to be unemployed lawyer
