“A potential client sends me a contract generated with AI (or a report or a policy) and just wants me to review it. I know that these things don’t happen to you. And if they did, you would quickly know. Has this happened to you? And what would you say?”
It is one of the most frequent topics of conversation among lawyers this summer.
But be careful!
1. I am not only writing this for lawyers. I am writing it primarily for the person who sends the document.
2. Furthermore, I am talking here about what is most relevant to me—a task assigned to a lawyer—but, with the necessary adjustments, this is happening in many other professions as well.
What the customer wants is reasonable: to pay only for the assurance that the AI hasn’t gone completely haywire.
Everyone wants to pay less, but no one wants to face the consequences of being wrong.
It’s not the first time
There’s nothing new about this: lawyers have always sold security. Never absolute security, but greater security, or at least the certainty that any problems that arise will follow a course in which the client will be protected.
No one ever wanted to pay for the lengthy report, which, in any case, no one even bothered to read.
There are also no new developments regarding AI: those of us who have been around for a while already experienced this when customers started using another disruptive innovation called Google.
The conversation from that summer in the early 2000s was, “the client already comes prepared, because they have searched for their topic on Google / they have downloaded the template.”
The clients already knew what was needed; they wanted to pay less.
Almost the same as today.
You are reading ZERO PARTY DATA. The newsletter about current affairs and technology law by Jorge García Herrero and Darío López Rincón.
In the free time that this newsletter allows us, we resolve complex issues related to personal data protection regulations and artificial intelligence. If you have any of these, let us know. Or contact us by email at jgh(at)jorgegarciaherrero.com
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Arguiñano and parsley
I’m going to explain how I see this phenomenon by drawing on another old memory: Karlos Arguiñano.
A Spanish chef who became famous, not just for being good, but especially for being charming: he told very bad jokes – but he told them in a very amusing way – while preparing the dishes, and he popularized expressions like “rico-rico” and “con fundamento.”
Well, going to eat at Arguiñano’s restaurant is one thing.
It’s a completely different thing to buy a sea bream yourself, clean it, add your own ingredients, put it in your oven, and, when the fish is halfway cooked, call Arguiñano to come over, take a look at it, take it out, sprinkle his magic parsley on top (“parsleying”), and hope that the sea bream turns out just as good as if he had made it himself.
Arguiñano is a cook, not a magician.
There is a third possibility, which is the one that particularly interests me:
Someone brings Arguiñano a sea bream and says to him, “This is what I was planning to eat. Tell me what you would do with it.”
That person isn’t just asking for parsley.
He’s handling over the best-crafted briefing that Arguiñano will receive all week.
Reviewing a contract created with AI: quality is not the same as usefulness.
When I receive a document created with AI, I skim through it to get a general idea. But that’s just an idea of its usefulness. The quality is another matter.
Current AIs generate complex, well-structured documents without any glaring errors, such as broken cross-references or fabricated case law.
Yes: a certain “quality” is just 20 euros away.
What is never available is “context”: AI cannot know what the client has not told it, and it performs very poorly in strategy.
The client usually knows what document they need, but almost never exactly what would be best for them -if they knew, they wouldn’t call me-; they call me precisely because of that.
If one settles for AI, the result is, at best, a document that is free of formal errors but fundamentally and/or objectively wrong.
But that document can be useful, and very much so.
Not as a draft to be corrected, but as an X-ray of what the client believes they need. With that and a conversation, I already know what needs to be done. It’s better to start from scratch, using my own models and tools, because patching or redirecting a flawed document always costs more – both for me and the client – than starting with a well-formulated question.
There is one exception that shines like a firefly in the dark: when the document is prepared by someone – usually in-house lawyers – who know what they are doing.
Then you might receive contracts or analyses that are 90-100% perfect, along with relevant and focused questions.
And then the review is truly just a review.
What you buy when you call me
We all have AIs.
What not everyone has is an established workflow with different AIs (commercial, local) for different use cases, specialized in the specific and thorny aspects of the all-encompassing and cross-cutting nature of data protection.
But that’s just how cooking is, and you can’t see it.
What you need and pay for is the answer to what you haven’t asked.
Data protection is not a trivial matter, and the value is almost always there, in what doesn’t appear in the prompt because you didn’t know it needed to be taken into account.
Two orders, two prices.
So there are two different tasks, and they have different prices.
For the pure parsley – “look at it, tell me if it’s good, approve it” – I charge Arguiñano’s price. A fixed price, no haggling. Not out of whim: because, for whatever reason, that’s why you call Arguiñano and not Pietro from the pizzeria downstairs.
And Arguiñano had to work hard to get there.
If the deal doesn’t work out at that price, it means the order was meant for Pietro. And that’s perfectly legitimate; there’s nothing wrong with that.
The other assignment – the one with substance, the one where the client comes and says, “Tell me what you would do” – I charge less for it than it costs me in hours: a fraction of the time I invest, with or without AI.
And not out of generosity.
In a time when pizzerias are popping up everywhere, advising on interesting projects is what keeps the mind sharp.
That client pays me in two currencies, and I’m more interested in the second one.
What does have a limited time left is charging per template, even though it has always been the most profitable business.
So, if you have a document created with AI and you’re unsure if it’s what you need, send it to me. But don’t just send it without context: tell me what you were trying to achieve with it.
From there, we start cooking.
Jorge García Herrero
Lawyer and Data Protection Officer
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