AI’s Legal Work Impact Likely on Speed, Not Quality, Study Says

Employing ChatGPT boosts the speed of legal work more than the quality, according to new research—a finding the study’s authors say has implications for the future of the billable hour.

AI led to “consistent and significant improvements in the speed,” of law students’ work on common legal tasks, said Daniel Schwarcz, a University of Minnesota Law School professor and one of the authors of the study.

Using AI enhanced students’ speed by as much as 32%, according to the draft paper, posted Wednesday. While AI use didn’t harm the quality of the work, its benefits varied.

The legal profession is beginning to grapple with generative AI’s impact, including how firms will have to adapt—or even abandon—the billable hour when technology-powered legal work goes much faster.

For clients, “the expectation should be already, that either you’re paying much less or you’re getting much more,” Schwarcz said. “If that is not consistent with experience, then I think clients should start asking why not.”

When AI boosts efficiency—in some, but not all, legal tasks—the same work may take less time and cost less. But firms may also choose to maintain their prices and offer higher quality work because attorneys will use the time they saved to be more thorough or do more work, he said.

“There is a trade-off there” for clients, Schwarcz said.

AI may also lead to companies bringing in-house legal work that was previously outsourced because legal departments weren’t sufficiently staffed, he added.

The study’s authors trained sixty University of Minnesota law students to use AI, then had them complete four legal tasks—"drafting a complaint, a contract, a section of an employee handbook, and a client memo"—either using Chat GPT-4, or without the technology, and assessed the results.