Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:12:18 · Jacob Lauritzen, Alessio Fanelli
[00:12:18] S0: Yep. The huge part of it is just figuring out what does the legal profession look like in five years, ten years, with all of this stuff. Like, coding is maybe a year or two ahead, so we can kinda look to that a little but, like, what are the primitives? How do people work? How do you collaborate if it's not a 200 thread email with, like, v five word files back and forth? Like, what does that look like? And that's, like, not even necessarily purely AI. That's just, like, build a much better product experience Yeah. And make sure you do it with, like, audit logs and data retention and all of those sort of really important things in regulated industry. And then there's the the AI part, which is, like, make the work faster and better and proactive agents that react to stuff when it comes in so you don't have to, you know, kick off everything. So I think a lot of the work is just figuring out what do we think it's gonna look like in five years. If, you know, model capabilities keep increasing, if price keeps coming down, what could we do? Can you log in and it's like command center where it's just like, you need to react to these five things that the agents have been doing lately and, like, review and check and improve the system? Maybe that's where we're going, or it is where we're going. [00:13:21] S2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna ask, like, could you go into that in a little more depth? Like, yeah, what what is the, like, law profession gonna look like in a few years?
00:13:21 · Alessio Fanelli, Jacob Lauritzen
[00:13:21] S2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna ask, like, could you go into that in a little more depth? Like, yeah, what what is the, like, law profession gonna look like in a few years? [00:13:30] S0: I should preface this by saying I don't know. I mean, who knows, really? But I think we can look to coding a lot. I think all lawyers are gonna be way more productive than they were before. They're gonna be able to do a lot more stuff at a higher quality for lower cost. I think the profession itself, the work itself, is gonna improve a lot. It's gonna be a lot more... I think lawyers are gonna spend more of their time doing the stuff that they became lawyers to do, you know, figuring out what's the right risk profile, what's manageable risk, what's like all of their judgment, strategic judgment, and, like, working with clients, they're gonna do that a lot more and much less of the, like, trolling through big documents to, like, find the smoking gun or, like, do all this menial, super annoying work that a lot of lawyers have been doing. [00:14:18] S2: What do you think is gonna happen in the partnership model? Like, do you think that stays or like what happens?
00:14:22 · Jacob Lauritzen
[00:14:22] S0: I gave this... I actually gave this a lot of thought just like last week. Yeah. Just the partnership model... I don't wanna get into too much of the details, but like the partnership model kind of exists because the only type of capital that these companies have is human capital. So, like, it's not like, you know, us or, like, a software engineering firm or, like, a manufacturing or whatever. You you have physical assets or, like, some sort of intangible assets that that you accrue over time, and and they pay dividends to the shareholders. But if you work in an industry like professional services, and it's the same for, like, consultancies and and whatever else, all of your value is in your people, and you can't really own human capital. You know, you you can't... You know, slavery is abolished. You can't own people, but you can rent them. You can pay them money. And so partnerships essentially is a structure where you make the human capital the owners of the company so that they stay. Yeah. Will that change? Like, I don't... It doesn't have to, but I think what we really want to do with Legora is we actually want lawyers to be able, law firms, be able to build some sort of intangible capital, some durable capital, and you can build a system that learns of how you work. A lot of firms right now think about, well, there's the ex law firm way of doing things, and we can codify that, I think, and we can build a system, and whether that's like a self improving knowledge graph or whatever it is, and precedent files and documents, where there's like a way of working that produces a really good output, and that can be their IP. So it's like a way to codify the human expertise and judgment into a system. That I think is... Now I'm just rambling completely, but like that's something that we want to help empower. And does that change the partnership model then? Because the incentives are different. In the partnership model, you just gotta bring more clients, and you don't wanna take away time from bringing in clients to codify your information, basically. Because, like, you get rewarded from, you know, eat what you kill or make this luck step, whatever. That needs to change a little bit. We need to figure out an incentive structure where partnerships... Partners are incentivized to codify things for...
00:16:24 · Jacob Lauritzen, Alessio Fanelli, Shawn Wang
To build an asset for the company, but right now, there aren't, because as soon as they leave the partnership, they don't get any dividends from the assets that they built. Yeah. So, there's like a... Yep. I think the the whole business model is is... We'll see. [00:16:38] S2: Yeah. Yeah. It's all in question right now. [00:16:40] S1: My actual other take, know, so on the partnership level, that's like the top end of the industry. Actually, my take is more on the bottom end. Right? Yeah. What happened there? Paralegal's gone. Yeah. Right? Like, junior lawyer's gone. Don't need them. Like, it's [00:16:56] S0: That's actually not what we're seeing. So I think it's... I don't know. Would you would you say that we're seeing that in engineering? [00:17:01] S1: Yeah. So junior engineers are really kind of cooked. Cooked. Like, you kinda have to [00:17:06] S0: come out of drop out [00:17:08] S1: of university fully baked or else you're Yeah. You're not gonna make it. I feel like I'm not... I'm being a bit dramatic for for a comedic purpose. But, like, yeah, I know a lot of lawyers, they started as paralegal. They go to law school, all these things. Right? And now they don't... They're not needed. They're they're seriously just not needed.
00:17:08 · Shawn Wang, Jacob Lauritzen, Alessio Fanelli
[00:17:08] S1: of university fully baked or else you're Yeah. You're not gonna make it. I feel like I'm not... I'm being a bit dramatic for for a comedic purpose. But, like, yeah, I know a lot of lawyers, they started as paralegal. They go to law school, all these things. Right? And now they don't... They're not needed. They're they're seriously just not needed. [00:17:27] S0: Yep. Yep. Yeah. It is... It's interesting what happens to the partnership model, like, pyramid. I think, generally, a lot of lawyers, you still need your... You need the next generation, and at least for engineering, the way I think about it is you have a good engineer today, they're worth a lot more even than they were two years ago, because they can produce so much more stuff, like, if they're good. I think it's the same thing in legal, where they can actually do a lot of really good work if they're good. So, I think it's more that, like, really good lawyers or junior lawyers are worth a lot more. [00:17:55] S1: Yeah. It's been the case. Right? Yeah. It's more so. But it's, [00:17:58] S0: yeah, it's polarizing even more so. Yeah. [00:18:00] S2: I'm actually curious about that. So, like, the whole, like, law business is basically, like, charging per hour. [00:18:07] S1: Mhmm. [00:18:07] S2: So Yep. You know, if each project now can be Yeah. Done a lot faster is it going to be, like, way cheaper?
00:18:07 · Alessio Fanelli, Jacob Lauritzen, Shawn Wang
[00:18:07] S2: So Yep. You know, if each project now can be Yeah. Done a lot faster is it going to be, like, way cheaper? [00:18:13] S0: Like This was actually Yeah. So, fun story. I was I was reading Max's YC application, and, like, helping him getting into YC, get Leia as it was called back then, it's YC. And this was my one thing, was like... [00:18:24] S1: And curious, Leia is a Danish thing for something? [00:18:26] S0: No, a Swedish. Swedish? No. Also, it means nothing. There's this really funny story, I think it was a Spanish newspaper that wrote about us in the early days, Leia, and then they they explained that the abbreviation was legally efficient Yoda assistant. Why Yoda? [00:18:44] S1: Yeah. I don't know. So I was like, why why is it See, hallucinations are not just from LLDs. [00:18:49] S0: No. I think journalists hallucinate. But, no, it doesn't mean anything. [00:18:53] S1: So he wrote the application.