As I look through all the posts in my PinHawk feed, I'm beginning to feel like I rolled out of bed on the wrong side today. It's a shame that we don't have an interactive medium, as I have many questions on Andrew Maloney's and Chris O'Malley's post this morning. Grabbing a definition from Wikipedia, we've got: "Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services." To summarize the "what you need to know" we've got the defraying costs using AI tool, that clients are driving the cost reductions and that in-house counsel can work with law firms to make other reductions to off set rising billing rates. There is no mention of the costs. So let's take my current AI peeve, CoPilot. The last price I saw was $30/user/month. So if you are already a basic Office 365 user, you're going to be adding to your spend and pretty doubling your Microsoft investment. I have yet to see the studies that show me I'm easily going to make back those monies. Can I make every user $30 more efficient? If so then I've managed to break even. And if there is a legal specific AI tool using CoPilot to access MS Office, that even more cost and more efficiencies I have to generate to achieve that. Innovation is going to require a lot more in the people and process portions and some significant calculations on the technology side. Is innovation just the offsetting of ever increasing rates? I guess my point is that true innovation is not going to come from adding AI tools. True innovation will come from restructuring the firms, the delivery of services and workflows, upskilling people and more. Read more at The American Lawyer: Will Innovation Help Law Firms and Clients Control the 'Cost Monster'?
Published September 29, 2023.
