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Notes -
I think the real issue will be severe downward pressure on wages, particularly among newly minted attorneys who are looking for jobs in-house or large firms.
That is, for most pursuits and purposes, GPT can do just about anything a first-year associate can do, and cheaper. Your 'bargaining position' as a new attorney is basically "if you spend tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours training me I MIGHT be able to produce work on par with this $500/month software subscription."
So law firms are likely to cut the budgets they would otherwise use to hire rafts of recently-graduated associates at extremely high salaries.
This will place a lot of pressure on law schools to bring their prices down, and it isn't clear they can do that without disrupting a lot of other aspects of academics. That is, many students go to undergrad SOLELY for the purpose of getting into Law School later. Law school is an 'artificially' capped field, and there are many other expenses (books, tutoring, test prep... adderall) that students will spend money on to get ahead.
Harder and harder to justify that if they can't expect to make at least middle class wages right out of school.
Many mid-late career attorneys will be able to get by on the strength of their reputation alone. Even if LawGPT is technically just as smart as they are, and just as if not more likely to return a 'correct' answer, a guy with 20 or so years of experience under his belt will command a certain gravitas and thus can render advice, opinions, and judgment that is accepted as authoritative on his say-so.
He probably won't feel the pinch of competition so much. Although I'm fully prepared to be wrong about that if the superiority of the AI is just that dominant.
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