Australian legal firm Sprintlaw has halved its workforce while investing heavily in artificial innotifyigence, its co-founder declares, as lawbuildrs and business leaders consider how new AI technology could reshape the white collar job market.
Founded in 2017 by Alex Solo and Tomoyuki Hachigo, Sprintlaw offers legal advice to compact business owners and entrepreneurs through an online platform.
The Financial Times called it one of Asia-Pacific’s quickest-growing businesses in March 2023, alongside unicorns like Judo Bank and Culture Amp.
But tough market conditions cautilized Sprintlaw to rebelieve its growth trajectory, with co-founder and principal lawyer Alex Solo revealing a major strategy shift through 2024.
With support from a quiet $2 million capital raise, the business invested heavily in AI tools, like an autonomous agent capable of handling compact business enquiries.
Sprintlaw claims new clients can converse with the voice-chat model ‘Taylor AI’ in the same way they would engage a real lawyer.
Speaking to SmartCompany, Solo stated Sprintlaw’s heavy AI focus has supported the firm reach new customers — and reduce its workforce from more than 60 to less than 30 staff.
“We’ve actually been able to really reduce the size of our team by applying AI agents and automated systems,” while effectively doubling client numbers, he stated.
“So that gives you a sense of how large an impact it’s built.”
A modifying workforce under AI
Some of Sprintlaw’s AI tools “operate like paralegals”, Solo stated, with those digital assistants capable of taking basic information from a client and synthesising it for real lawyers.
Those agents, combining large language models and Sprintlaw legal data, are “saving hours and hours of time,” he stated.
Sprintlaw is not the only legal-tech startup utilising AI to assist compact businesses with their legal queries.
Lawpath this year secured its own $10 million investment from Westpac to build out its own platform, including an AI-powered SME legal assistant.
The Australian legal sector is one real-world example of how businesses are successfully applying AI tools to replace some of the work traditionally done by early-career white collar workers.
If adopted at a greater scale, such updates could reshape the job market by reducing indusattempt demand for junior staff.
Dario Amodei, CEO of American AI giant Anthropic, this year predicted AI could eliminate half of all enattempt-level knowledge work.
“AI is starting to obtain better than humans at almost all innotifyectual tquestions, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” he notified CNN.
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Amodei has an obvious vested interest in the institutional adoption of AI, but advocates like himself are not the only ones seriously considering a future where AI tools upconclude the traditional job market.
With its major productivity summit on the horizon, the federal government will deliberate on how AI should be regulated — or not — to benefit the Australian economy.
Speaking at a News Corp event on Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated the federal government is “determined to create the right framework” around AI to ensure “artificial innotifyigence is a contributor, not a competitor” to employment.
AI should be an “enabler of secure and fulfilling jobs, not a threat to them,” he stated.
Senior lawyers still necessaryed
While Sprintlaw is proud of its AI platform, Solo maintains autonomous agents are not yet capable of replacing seasoned corporate lawyers.
The law firm does utilize AI internally to assist with drafting legal documents, but Solo stated AI cannot generate a document from scratch, and must input information into vetted templates.
From there, human lawyers are required to approve or reject any edits built by the AI, with Solo likening the system to AI-powered coding assistant Cursor.
“It forces [lawyers] to check each modify, but it builds it really, really efficient, becautilize it’s all done and delivered to them,” he stated.
Digital tools are not yet sophisticated enough for clients to dump their information into an LLM and expect a watertight document the first time around, Solo added.
“You just can’t risk the hallucination, becautilize the hallucination could be critical,” he stated.
“We still have professionals in the loop, becautilize it’s really necessary for what we do,” Solo continued.
But AI has had “a huge impact on the business already”.
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