Writing a will isn't really "transactional", there is no negotiation involved. And wills are already a highly commoditised legal product. (So I agree with you that will drafting is ripe for disruption by LLMs, but don't think this indicates a broader disruption of transactional work or the profession generally.)

50 years is way too long a time horizon to predict much of anything

In 50 years time 95% of legal complaints will be decided by AI

How does that track though? If, as a programmer, I claim programming is really the tasks a principle engineer does at Google or Netflix, is that accurate or survivorship bias from someone who made it to the top of the chain?

If lawyerin’ was always doing something novel, it wouldn’t be much of a set of laws. The bulk of lawyerin’ in the US is, I would guess without a whit of substantiation, a lot of small claims and standard form type things. Not discounting the value of the profession in any way, but if one job based on standard codes can have its basic functions replaced by AI, why not another?

That's how I feel reading HN's opinions on the recent math results. <5% of the responses even understand the point they're supposed to be arguing. AI might take over mathematics. It might not. The discussion regarding that topic is almost devoid of any relevant information though.

> probably none of these people have a law education.

Domain knowledge is informative sometimes but mainly overrated: the success of LLMs proves just that. What most lawyers do is fairly standardized and routine, efforts to invoke mystery cases or "novel" is an attempt at resisting the inevitable. The "the only British food in Palo Alto" equivalent of unique skills.

Lawyers would be better suited to argue what programming is because they know logic. There’s not much to algorithms: do this, then do that.

Programmers typically don’t know law outside of which license allows them to get code for free.

Wouldn't be surprised, if a human attorney would get 5%, while copy-pasting ChatGPT answers, report in the results a week past the deadline, with a $12,500 retainer charged upfront.

Totally fair. However, even if the LLM would come to the same conclusion and produce the same content that a competent attorney would, the attorney must still thoroughly vet the work for accuracy. So there is potentially time saved in research and drafting, but it’s not the miracle some might characterize it as.

An 80% miss rate on a benchmark suggests to me that automation has a very long way to go, even for the drafting and research phases.

I'm guessing what they're saying is that nothing goes to litigation if it's a clear pattern-match to existing cases, so actual litigation practice is only novel cases.

Isn't that just in the US/Commonwealth judicial system? I could be completely wrong on how others, like non-adversarial judicial systems, work and/or how pervasive the US system is or is not.

EDIT: specifically around the use of judicial precedent in case-law.

90% of litigation is pressuring a settlement.

> How much novelty can there be?

As much novelty as there is in human interactions.

> How much novelty can there be?

Infinite