Extract from Stephen Embry’s article, “It All Hinges On Judgment: The Work Not Counted.”
The appropriate comparison is the total cost of producing an acceptable final product with and without AI.
I recently wrote about Torsten Slok’s argument that outside of big tech, AI has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America. I suggested that could be even more true in legal. And I promised more on whether and how AI really reduces hours, an argument Melissa Rogozinski and I have made before. So here goes.
After reading Harshit Garg‘s recent article in Legal Insider, I wonder if the reason we aren’t seeing the true financial payoff of AI in legal is not because AI doesn’t save time but because we aren’t good at counting all the time it takes to turn AI’s output into something useful. Time that requires judgment that AI can’t provide.
Garg is the founder and CEO of a company that builds agentic AI for lawyers. He notes that AI companies measure the cost of generating output. They can tell customers how many tokens were consumed, how quickly a document was produced, and what the generation cost was.
