{"id":165235,"date":"2025-12-03T17:04:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T01:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=165235"},"modified":"2025-12-03T17:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T01:04:09","slug":"wp-justice-is-not-meant-to-be-a-luxury-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=165235","title":{"rendered":"WP: ‘Justice is not meant to be a luxury good’"},"content":{"rendered":"

WP: Max Raskin is a fellow and adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law. He is a co-founder of Uris Acquisitions. He writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The bar exam, the Law School Admission Test and law school itself are the price you pay for joining a government-protected legal guild \u2014 no different from taxi medallions or liquor licenses. It is essentially illegal to represent someone else in court without passing this test, which is an exception to the general rule that people should be allowed to hire whomever they want without the government\u2019s permission.<\/p>\n

Many empirical studies question the effectiveness of the bar exam in predicting lawyerly prowess, but this should be settled by a free market. We don\u2019t make auto mechanics or electricians go to school for an additional three years, even though their professions can cause much more physical harm. We rely on credentials, social signaling, reviews and other market mechanisms for determining quality.<\/p>\n

Lawyers are not doctors, so more experimentation in the legal profession can be tolerated. Lawyers are not constantly making life-or-death decisions, and when they do, there are procedures to ensure that counsel is competent. Run-of-the-mill contract review and regulatory filings, however, don\u2019t warrant a licensure scheme.<\/p>\n

This is especially true in light of advances in artificial intelligence. AI systems already draft wills, nondisclosure agreements, term sheets, employment contracts and regulatory memos at associate-level quality. There are those who point to the occasional lawyer who doesn\u2019t check hallucinated citations and embarrasses himself in court, but these are exceptions. The vast majority of lawyers who use AI don\u2019t want to admit it for the same reason doctors don\u2019t want to admit to Googling symptoms, so there is a negative selection bias where stories of federal judges sloppily using AI catch more attention than routine use of the tool…<\/p>\n

Standardized legal work, which primarily consists of updating form documents, can almost certainly be automated. The billable hour is not a sacrosanct system etched on the tablets of Moses. It is a 20th-century invention that will collapse when the cost of producing effective legal work falls dramatically because of AI. Lawyers expect to save 240 hours a year on average by using generative AI tools, according to a Thomson Reuters survey this year. This is partly due to the nature of law itself \u2014 once a rule turns out to be just and workable, it can simply be repeated. In our common law system, this means that law ought to be more, not less, efficient as time goes on…<\/p>\n

One of the most nefarious forms of protectionism is the limit on nonlawyers being partners in law firms. This rule prevents specialization, which is the cornerstone of economic order. Why would someone think that a lawyer who has trained in a narrow field would be good at firm operations or marketing or hiring? In most other industries, chief technology officers deal with tech, chief operation officers deal with operations and hiring is with human resources. But in law firms, essentially all the ultimate decision-makers must be lawyers. Kim Kardashian could surely run a more efficient marketing department than a white-shoe firm.<\/p>\n

These rules are marketed as protecting justice when they really protect incumbents. Over the past decade, legal costs have risen by about twice the rate of inflation, while technology should have driven costs down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WP: Max Raskin is a fellow and adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law. He is a co-founder of Uris Acquisitions. He writes: The bar exam, the Law School Admission Test and law school itself are … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=165235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165236,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165235\/revisions\/165236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=165235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=165235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=165235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}