A popular debate topic in legal tech circles focuses on who will ultimately control the future of legal AI. Is it the frontier AI companies who continue to roll out legal focused add-ons? Or will it be purpose-built platforms built specifically for legal that sit on top of LLMs?
A new faction of lawyers argues that the focus of that debate is misplaced. These tech-savvy lawyers believe that true competitive advantage won’t come from the software itself, but from the human talent operating it.
Enter the “Legal Quant.”
What is a “Legal Quant”?
Funds lawyer Jamie Tso first surfaced the concept of the Legal Quant in a blog post in which he posited that legal should adopt a quant model similar to that of the trading firm Jane Street. Jane Street is a firm that prioritizes hiring creative, tech-fluent thinkers over those with traditional investment banking backgrounds.
What does Jamie mean, specifically? Legal Quants are attorneys who possess the ability to design, evaluate, and deploy their own AI systems. Unlike legal engineers who focus on incrementally optimizing existing workflows, legal quants aim to redesign legal services from first principles, asking what new ways of practicing law are now possible because of AI.
Jamie’s thinking soon also attracted the attention of another tech savvy lawyer, Raymond Sun, and the Legal Quant group quickly evolved into an exclusive, invitation-only network. Today, the group hosts hackathons, has a website showcasing member projects, and an active Substack.
In a recent episode of the Technically Legal podcast, Jamie and Ray discussed the origins of the Legal Quant movement and what it might mean for the future delivery of legal services. Below is a Q&A in which the duo examine the fundamental difference between legal engineers and legal quants, and why they believe talent, not tools, will define the next generation of elite legal work. (Lightly edited for clarity).
Legal Quant vs. Legal Engineer: What’s the Real Difference?
Chad Main: Your group specifically distinguishes between legal quants and legal engineers, I want you guys to explain the distinction, but I also want to give kind of a background to people that might not be familiar…
Jamie Tso: So a legal engineer is someone that looks at an existing workflow and thinks, how do I optimize it? So that’s an incremental change to us. A legal quant looks at existing workflows and thinks, how do I redesign the whole thing from first principles? The distinction here is that for legal quants, reimagine the output given the same ingredients. We think from the client’s perspective, what is the best experience in a given AI? We ask questions like, “What is possible now that was not possible before because of AI, and how that should affect how legal work should be created and consumed?” So, to my mind, a legal quant should be obsessed with the idea of how do you practice law in a different way because of AI, and can give you one example.
From a WhatsApp Group to an Invitation Only Network
CM: So you mentioned that you started as a WhatsApp group, but now it’s grown, and it’s a very distinguished and exclusive group. Tell people what the group is. What is Legal Quants?
JT: So Legal Quants is a network of lawyers who design AI systems to reimagine how legal work can be created and consumed. So it started off as a WhatsApp group, and then slowly we see that the messages in that group exploded, and there is a lot of demand from people wanting to join that group. The reason for that is because there is a lot of intelligence coming out of the community, and the stuff that we put out is also pretty interesting.
I think that that’s drawn a lot of attention, so I first started off creating a group on LinkedIn called you know Five Coding Lawyers, and I made it into like an open group, and then overnight there are like a few 100 people who joined, but then the group is dead. Like nothing, no one actually posts anything there, and I feel like that’s just not the right forum for it, so we made it into a WhatsApp group, and then we start to see that well, there’s a lot of engagement there.
Part of that is because you know we have made that into a safe space where people can you know talk about things without – you know – fearing judgment. So then we also made an invitation only, so that we can keep the you know quality high to keep people well in attention. So slowly we thought, well, why don’t we just pull all the projects together into one website? So that’s what we did, and why don’t we just start organizing more events? So we did two more hackathons, one with Manis, and another with Replit. So we kind of slowly built out this network of people who are extremely fluent in AI, and started having them collaborate on stuff. So that’s how it started, and you can also take a look at you know our Substack to see you know what we discuss. . . .
Why Talent Will Outlast the Tools
CM: So Ray, one of the tenets of the group is, and I I don’t know if it’s your post or Jamie’s post, but one of the things said is we believe the next generation of elite legal work won’t be defined by who has the best tools, but the attorneys have the rare ability to design, evaluate, deploy these tools. What do you mean by that specifically? It’s not going to be the best tools that win – It’s going to be something more. What is that something more?
Raymond Sun: So as you know from history, tools come and go. The tool that’s hot today-it’s hard to say if they’re going to be relevant tomorrow, especially in this space where the cost of software is basically zero. Anyone can just spin up a tool from nothing, from thin air, in like a matter of like seconds or minutes, right? And so the constant throughout time is just human talent, human intellectual creativity, and I can give you AGI tomorrow, Chad, but if you don’t know how to use it, you’re not going to reap the benefits of AGI.
It’s only those who really understand how the tool works, and also can really think on first principles and apply it to actual real-world cases and deliver real impact, right? I think that’s kind of like the common universal struggle across the whole industry, which is we have all these tools available. Okay, next question: How do you deliver real impact? And the how, that how question, 80% or even 90% is a human problem, and this is where all the upscaling, human adoption, culture, education-all of that stuff gets wrapped in there. You probably hear that all the time, Chad. That’s where the humor comes in. And so, really, the idea, and as Jamie mentioned, legal quant is to really support the existing unicorn talent and also feature unicorn talent that really get these tools are really at the frontier, building great stuff and delivering real impact. And the challenge is how do you get these people to feel like their values are being properly recognized? Really creating new markets for them to feel like that they really have not just control of their career, but really getting 10x the benefits for being 10x impactful.
Curious how this plays out in practice?
Percipient combines AI-driven contract review with expert human oversight the same philosophy Jamie and Ray describe. See how it works →
Want the full conversation? Listen to the complete episode of Technically Legal →
