Australian law firm Sprintlaw is halving its workforce while investing heavily in artificial intelligence, co-founders say as lawmakers and business leaders are considering how new AI technology can reshape the white-collar job market.
Founded in 2017 by Alex Solo and Tomoyuki Hachigo, Sprintlaw provides legal advice to small business owners and entrepreneurs through an online platform.
Financial Times It was one of the fastest growing companies in the Asia-Pacific region in March 2023, alongside unicorns such as Judo Bank and Culture Amplifiers.
However, due to the tough market situation, Sprintlaw rethinks its growth trajectory, with co-founder and lead lawyer Alex Solo revealing the key strategic shifts to 2024.
With support from a quiet $2 million in capital raise, businesses have invested heavily in AI tools, like autonomous drugs that can handle small business inquiries.
Sprintlaw claims that new clients can talk to the voice chat model “Taylor AI” just like they do with a real lawyer.
I'll talk SmartCompany, Solo said Sprintlaw's heavy AI focus has helped businesses reach new customers and helped them cut their workforce from over 60 to less than 30 staff.
“We were able to really reduce the size of our teams by actually using AI agents and automated systems,” he said.
“So it gives you a sense of how much of an impact it has had.”
Changing workforce under AI
Some of Sprintlaw's AI tools “work like a paralegal,” Solo said with a digital assistant who can get basic information from clients and integrate it for real lawyers.
Combining large-scale language models with Sprint Law's legal data, these agents “save time and time,” he said.
Sprintlaw is not the only legal technology startup that uses AI to help small businesses with legal questions.
This year LawPath secured a $10 million investment from Westpac to build its own platform, including AI-powered SMEs.
The Australian legal sector is one real-world example of how businesses use AI tools to use some of the work traditionally done by early white-collar workers.
If adopted on a larger scale, such updates could restructure the job market by reducing the industry's demand for junior staff.
Dario Amodei, CEO of American AI Giant Anthropic, predicts that AI can eliminate half of all entry-level knowledge work this year.
“AI is beginning to get better than humans on almost every intellectual task. We, as a society, are working on that,” he said. CNN.
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While Amodei has a clear vested interest in the institutional adoption of AI, it is not just his own supporters who are seriously considering a future where AI tools will raise the traditional job market.
With the major productivity summit on the horizon, the federal government will deliberate how AI should or may not be regulated to benefit the Australian economy.
Speaking at a News event on Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the federal government is “determined to create the right framework” around AI, ensuring that “artificial intelligence is a contributor, not a competitor.”
AI is “a safe and fulfilling job enabler and not a threat to them,” he said.
I still needed a senior lawyer
Sprintlaw is proud of its AI platform, but Solo claims that autonomous agents can't replace veteran corporate lawyers yet.
The law firm uses AI internally to help draft legal documents, but Solo said that AI cannot generate documents from scratch and requires that information be entered into the review template.
From there, human lawyers must approve or reject edits created by AI by licensing the edits created by AI to an AI-powered assistant cursor.
“It forces [lawyers] To see each change, everything is done and delivered to them, so it's really, really efficient,” he said.
Digital tools are not as sophisticated as clients would expect watertight documents only when they dump information into LLM, Solo added.
“We cannot put hallucinations at risk because hallucinations can be important,” he said.
“There are still experts in the loop because that's really necessary for what we're doing,” Solo continued.
However, AI has “already had a huge impact on the business.”
