Lawyer.exe | Trial by AI

some thoughts on kirkland building its own harvey 1) kirkland is spending $500m over four years in order to build its own internal ai legal tools; kirkland intends to spend $100m this year 2) i suspect that kirkland is doing this because they have told themselves that they have valuable data and because they want to appear differentiated 3) i think the first issue is that kirkland probably does not have differentiated data from other elite law firms; at least, not at the level a harvey would absorb 4) all the elite firms probably have similar internal workflow data and so long as some of them defect, that is enough to commoditize the data kirkland wants to use for its platform 5) and, to the extent that they do have different internal workflows, harvey and legora will end up representing a better version of them and this will put kirkland at a disadvantage 6) moreover, companies like kirkland will have difficulty building their internal legal platforms because they do not have experience with software development 7) and, there are both cultural and structural issues with them managing software developers, like they cannot give non-lawyers equity in the firm due to regulation 8) so, i think firms like kirkland are better off using tools like harvey and legora and then looking to focus on where their value really is now: client relationships, local knowledge (litigation, regulation) and legal r&d (novel structures, etc...) 9) anyway, this seems to me like a phenomenon that ai creates across a lot of industries, where firms that were previously vertically integrated become unbundled due to ai because part of the intelligence gets moved to the labs or otherwise gets commoditized 10) and so, a new set of companies are created whose job it is in order to provide services complementary to the labs: forward deployed like harvey and legora and data providers like mercor, surge and handshake

Going to be extremely honest: many junior associates set expectations for themselves that nobody else actually has. The partner didn’t send the assignment at 9 PM because he expects you to work all night. It was just the first free moment he had. Stuff that hits Friday at 4 usually doesn’t need eyes until Monday. ‘No’ is an acceptable answer when someone asks for availability. Grind when you have bandwidth and it matters. But you don’t need to kill yourself over every email. Yes, there are toxic partners and firms that demand misery. Avoid them. And yes, occasional all-nighters happen. But they should be rare. In my experience, you can do exciting work with great people and still have a demanding but reasonable life.