Lawyer

“The only one who does well in the theater are the lawyers Who make a bunch of money on it, and like you get some AGs who get to say, I signed on to a thing, and like we won, and so everyone needs to be able to say they won.”

“I think that there will be more lawyers than ever before.”

“In this company we have over 200. Yeah. And so, and then on the commercial side, like, actually, I guess doing what a normal lawyer would do there's only about, like, 25.”

“But the thing that happened with like the last generation of coding models is you can actually take sets of documents and create synthetic docs that are so good that the lawyers can't tell the difference between whether they're created, you know, by an actual …”

“They handle the legal work. We handle everything that's non-legal in nature. So everything that's business marketing, customer acquisition, back office and support that's on a manifest OS, a legal judgment risks with the lawyer.”

“Almost always performance. Performance is more important. Almost always. If you're a lawyer, you can wait two seconds more for the output if it's better. You can probably wait an hour more for the output if it's better.”

“Eventually, lawyers will not be nitty gritty about the language of the contracts. They will work a level above, which is maybe like, What's our negotiation stance? Like what risks are we okay? Which ones are we not okay taking? And not sit and type into word.”

“So naturally there, there's roles, I think that, that creep in, you know, you get the, like a lawyer and accountant are not going to work in the same way that you know, a software engineer might. And that's just a fact of life. So, okay. So if they don't want …”

“There are going to be more lawyers in the next five years than we have today.”

“But I think most things that lawyers learn are very Inconsistent with being entrepreneur. So when you're graded as a lawyer, you learn every exam in law school virtually is issue spotting. So you get credit for identify, there's like fact patterns, identify al…”

“Now, I do want to just inject into this that a very strongly worded letter from a lawyer can be very effective. It depends on the person. It depends on the situation and what the resources are of the other company, that sort of thing. But a very scary letter f…”

“I think that lawyers have been removed from the angel pre-seed you know, since quite a long time now. You know, for those 250,000 dollar, 500,000 dollar rounds, most founders, when I talk to them, they're like, I don't think I need a lawyer. I just use this Y …”

“We only have one shot with these lawyers because they are very impatient. If it doesn't work, they're not going to come back.”

“I think this is, by the way, super under discussed that the people who tended to be the slowest adopters of technology love AI. That's physicians, that's lawyers, that's certain accounting types. It's, you know, it's actually kind of fascinating. It's complian…”

“As far as I know, employment of lawyers is still at record highs in the last decade, and there's also record high applications for law schools right now.”

“I think we will see the billable hour increase, as opposed to completely disappear. Okay. I think lawyers are going to charge higher and higher premiums for their eyeballs on work and their Mind share. And they're going to switch other services to flat fee bil…”

“I think we're going to see more lawyers splinter off from big law and start their own solo shops or join tech companies as there's never been more opportunities for them to do so.”

“I'm only angry with accountants and lawyers and economists, not because they do what they do, but because they have too much power doing it. And they've achieved a kind of monopoly over decision making, which I don't think they have a reasonable claim to.”

“We did accountant that's working. We're going to do lawyers, and then we're looking for the other ones, but it's kind of really hard because there's so many possibilities that it's more about what type of answer answer in each of those industries and which one…”

“Selling software to lawyers is a particularly shitty business. It's a more constrained business. You've got to do more. You've got to help more. You've got to speed them up”

“I think at first you can start charging when the human's charging and then you'll have competitors and they'll come in and they'll charge a little bit less. And then other competitors will come and they'll charge a little bit less. And it's kind of beautiful, …”

“There are certain domains where it does really well, and, you know, I definitely like, oftentimes will, you know, ask an AI model about a legal question now before I call a lawyer, because I find it's not replacing my call with a great lawyer, but it does info…”

“So many early stage builders and late stage builders ended up spending like equivalent or more money on lawyers than they were on engineers.”

“The CEO's job uniquely is to consider different interests and weigh them against each other to reach the net optimal outcome for the company. When this goes wrong, what it looks like is everybody gets scared of the lawyers and the CEO follows exactly what the …”

“If you do that to lawyers and nonprofit sector employees who I lived around in D.C., you will get a revolution, and I mean that.”

“It's like, bankers make less than lawyers now, which is always my favorite fact, which is kind of a great statement at the moment, which is like, the world's transparent enough and everything is about legal warfare, and so the lawyers are making more than the …”

“I'm kind of viewing it as you're more and more entering a workspace of reviewing Work than actually doing it. And you are managing the expectations from your clients and the expectations and the work from your AI agents, right? You're effectively instructing t…”

“When you say there's a copilot, we're all going to have a software engineer copilot. Like if you're going to be a, If you're a professor of English, you're going to have a software co-pilot helping you do what you're doing. If you're going to be an accountant,…”

“Lawyers are pretty useful. They're smart. They know the law, but B they actually like also know people like they know companies that have done this or tried to do this and who have they partnered with. If you think about it, a lawyer is often you know, working…”

“For every dollar lawyers spend on software, they spend five dollars on Westlaw Thomson Reuters for actual legal information.”

“Lawyers, along with government unions, are the main funders of Democrat politicians in California.”

“Our lawyers said that it would almost certainly go through.”

“The lawyer that you engage will tell you, you've got a great case when you start out. As you get closer, To the courtroom door. And as you spent more and more money, they start changing the tune slightly just because suddenly, and maybe just not hearing what t…”

“You can't trust lawyers with diligence.”

“You know, when you do a formation, people come to me and say, hey, should I use a lawyer to do a formation? I say, absolutely not. Not only will they do it wrong because they don't do 1000 of thousands of these like we do, we make damn sure we do it right, hav…”

“I don't think lawyers are a good niche ever. Like the number of startups that try to do lawyers, like it's a very, very low probability success niche. It's just, they don't get tech. They don't like to spend money oddly because they have a lot of money.”

“Franchises are best owned by lawyers because it's all contract.”

“And we learned that like the form of the feature, whether it's in word or not actually matters more than almost the product itself. Cause if you're building a web app for lawyers, sorry, you already lost the game.”

“And so again, to use an LLM Is four to five orders of magnitude cheaper and faster?”

“ChatGPT is like a giant job creation scheme for lawyers and consultancies. Because the lawyers have to work out who we're suing, and what all the new contracts look like, and the consultancies, and people actually have to go and deploy all of this stuff.”

“A lot of people say, oh, we're going to replace lawyers and doctors. Well, probably not. I mean, sure, the AI can go through all the legal files and all of the statutes and, or all of the, you know, images of cancer versus not cancer, et cetera. There's all so…”

“I do think things like white collar knowledge work that is high paid, lawyers being one of them, is probably a good area. I think anything where today people are paying a lot of money and people are being paid by the hour that a machine could do as better, in …”

“Lawyers like me have created a series of rules and regulations that have changed the incentives for investors that often works for the private equity firms, but may not necessarily work for workers, for customers, even for other investors.”

“And my, the point in that essay is what Joe just said, which is like, it will be illegal to do that. Like, it's not going to happen because it's going to be illegal. Like AIs are not going to get certified as doctors and lawyers anytime soon. Like that, that I…”

“The best benefit is we'll replace most of the lawyers. Because you could just say, generate me a contract that has these characteristics and it'll throw in the clauses and et cetera.”

“What we say is we want to replace all of the lawyers and make the law free, but it's not political.”

“Lawyers are safe. Yeah. Lawyers are safe because the government takes so long to change anything. You're not going to be able to get a GPT in the courtroom anytime soon. That's for damn sure.”

“Lawyers really don't want this technology to move forward that much because they realize that a lot of their job is copying and pasting documents. Not all lawyers are like that, but some of them are. And if AI can just do that and replace them, it puts a lot o…”

“Lawyers themselves are using this technology, but instead of passing the savings on to the client, they're keeping the rates the same and just pocketing the savings for themselves.”

“Lawyers don't even have the answers. Like Congress doesn't have an answer for this yet.”

“It's very difficult to be a nomadic lawyer because your clients want and often need to see you in person, right? Like you have to be there to sign documents, to witness documents, to have Like frankly, very important conversations.”

“That was the summer I realized that the lawyers didn't call the shots. The business people called the shots, and the lawyers helped you get it done within the context of the law.”

“I think the lawyers are at fault for pushing some very aggressive terms for first or early funds.”

“All these institutions over time kind of end up run by lawyers, right, of one form or another, right? There's sort of, you know, people who kind of deal in words, right, people who deal in kind of symbolic manipulation at the word level you know, sort of the s…”

“You should not give regulation to lawyers. Yourself, you know, you need to go as deep as possible.”

“They're very argumentative and they are very educated in their craft. However, they're not as educated in like ways of running a business or technology.”

“When they were just starting out that company in San Francisco in 2012, they were told by their lawyers, big law firm, don't worry about getting those licenses, you don't need them. They fired those lawyers”

“And on the other hand, we know that lawyers tend to be less optimistic than the rest of the population.”

“The cap tables that we see, and we've now seen thousands of cap tables, it's surprising how many times the lawyers actually get the conversions wrong.”

“Lawyers that I knew that trained at the larger firms and were really good, but who for lifestyle reasons had either started their own practice or joined a smaller boutique firm. And generally speaking, they would charge themselves out for half their previous h…”