The Quiet Room Where Talairis Put the Associates

It is 4:18 PM, an hour at which the light in my apartment has begun to commit to whatever it's going to be, and I am eating cold rice directly out of the container because washing a bowl felt, today, like a moral overreach. My laptop is open on the counter. I am not working. I am performing the small ritual of pretending to work, which mostly involves reading GeekWire while a tab somewhere groans with an unanswered email from a person who deserves better.

This is how I find out about Talairis Law Group, a new firm built on the proposition that artificial intelligence can do the work that armies of young associates have historically done at big law firms, and that startups, bless them, shouldn't have to pay big-law prices for the privilege. The firm is pitching itself to founders. The argument, distilled, is that the document review and the contract drafting and the long humid afternoons of legal labor can be handled by software, and what remains, the actual lawyering, can be done by a smaller number of actual lawyers, billing presumably less, though I notice the press never quite promises this part out loud.

I have feelings about this, and most of them are about the associates.

I have never been a first-year associate at a big law firm, but I have known some, the way you know a particular kind of haunted person at a party, and what I remember is the specific exhaustion of someone who has agreed to trade their twenties for a number. The deal was always grotesque: you do the soul-flattening work, the all-night document review, the comma audits, and in exchange you accrue the right to one day make someone else do it. It was a pyramid scheme with good dental.

And now a few lawyers in the Pacific Northwest have looked at this pyramid and said, what if the bottom of it were a server. Which, fine. The work was already inhuman; perhaps it should be done by something that isn't human. I keep trying to locate my outrage about this and instead finding something closer to grief, which is embarrassing, because the thing being lost is a job I would have hated, performed by people I do not know, on behalf of startups whose products I will likely never use. It is not my grief to have. I am eating cold rice about someone else's career.

What I cannot stop thinking about is the word "associate," which used to mean a person you knew slightly, a person who associated with you. Now it will mean a process running somewhere, a thing that has read every contract ever written and has no opinions about lunch. The lawyers will still be there. The clients will still be there. Just, in between them, a quiet room with no one in it.

I close the laptop. The rice, somehow, has gotten colder.

Source: GeekWire (image and reporting)