Alex was asking what software plaintiff law firms used before AI tools arrived. His view is that investors misjudged the market by counting only what firms spent on software, not the labor that software can now replace.
Wow.
…better job than it could do by itself. That is, I think, the future of law, right? Where you as a lawyer are really going to look more like a almost a data scientist and engineer engineering something to be better and better. And that is a shift the top law firms on EVE mentally kind of go through.
Yeah. Well, I kind of think of if you look at your average law firm where they don't really know AI. And actually, like, this is kind of an interesting kind of take on the world of AI enabled applications in general. Like, what was the software stack for law before? Well, if you're a big firm like Wilson Cincinnati, probably the most important thing is like your time tracker, right? That's just your billing by the hour. If you're in contingency law, it's like, well, your time matters, but you're not billing your customers on that. You probably need to have like a, you know, each case, here's how much money I'm spending on the case. But like, I imagine your primary tool was Microsoft Word. And there wasn't, and this is how like VCs would have like gotten this industry wrong before, which is like, oh, well, the software market for plaintiff law is small. They all buy Microsoft Office. Yeah, Microsoft Office is kind of expensive. So therefore, like the software spend is like in the tens of billions of dollars a year or something, you know, seemingly comically small. But wait a minute, the outcomes that they deliver is in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. They can't deliver more outcomes because they're really constrained on labor. And they can't hire labor for 12 cents an hour because it doesn't exist. So it…
know, this is the unfortunate thing about plaintiff law and institutions is historically plaintiff law really didn't need more than a cell phone email address. Honestly, even Microsoft Word, some people on the solos would not buy it for cost reasons or other reasons. No, it's because if you think…
And to make that concrete, it's like, I'm in a car accident. I'm not at fault. You know, the adversary, if you will, like the other side's insurance company is like, oh, you weren't that hurt. We'll give you a dollar. Right. They always try to like deny, deny, deny. Like rule number one of an…
That's right. Because insurance is the one that's dealing with 100,000 different laws. They have the
