My first law firm billed clients $600 per hour for me to use my Harvard degree on data entry. Thank God AI is changing the industry

The story starts with a kid in Kansas who wanted a law job at 12, then followed that obsession all the way to Harvard Law School. The payoff, at least at first, was underwhelming: his first assignment at a firm was making sure signature lines matched across 18 document sets. The client was billed more than $600 an hour for it.

That kind of waste used to be baked into the business. Young associates with fancy credentials did non-legal chores, and nobody seemed eager to change the setup. Now the writer says that era is already fading, and AI is the reason. The technology is still rough. Lawyers worry about hallucinations and mistakes. But even with those flaws, it is reshaping how legal work gets done.

Two names keep coming up in that shift: Harvey and Legora. Both arrived less than five years ago, and both now loom over BigLaw’s AI scene. They are valued at $15 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively, and they market themselves less like law vendors than tech brands, with sports sponsorships, celebrity billboards, and all the rest. Legal software used to be a hard sell because partners had little reason to chase efficiency. That joke is aging badly.

Firms are now hiring engineers and trying to look more like tech companies behind the curtain. Some lawyers are leaving top firms altogether and taking clients with them. The article points to Chris Kercher’s move from Quinn Emanuel to start a small, tech-driven firm as a sign of what’s coming. The bigger claim is blunt: BigLaw could shrink into something much thinner, while access to strong legal help spreads further than it does now.