Wednesday, July 09, 2025

AI is also coming for oral argument

 You gotta read this post by Adam Unikowsky, a top Supreme Court advocate, who discusses whether AI can perform well at a Supreme Court oral argument.  His conclusions:

  • Yes, a robot lawyer would be an above-average Supreme Court advocate.
  • The DoNotPay people weren’t ambitious enough. You don’t need to have a human read back what the robot lawyer says. You can have an actual robot lawyer.
  • Courts should permit robot lawyers at oral arguments and shouldn’t discourage this practice.
  • If there’s any aspect of a lawyer’s job where AI is likely to shine relative to humans, it’s oral argument. Oral argument should be the first, not the last, frontier of AI-assisted legal practice.
You can also listen to Adam's oral argument versus Claude's argument in the post itself.  Incredible.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Big Law may not be pleased with this AI trend if it affects profits, which are doing pretty good now, according to David Lat: "The 2025 Am Law 200 rankings are based on 2024 financial performance—and last year, the Second Hundred did quite well for themselves, based on multiple metrics:

Total revenue: $27.8 billion, up 10.9 percent.
Revenue per lawyer (RPL): $849,860, up 8.6 percent.
Profits per equity partner (PPEP): $1.1 million, up 12.6 percent.
Total headcount: 32,703, up 2.1 percent."

https://davidlat.substack.com/p/2025-am-law-200-second-100-law-firms-profits-per-equity-partner-ppep-revenue-per-lawyer-rpl-in-2024