In the next episode, Louis Litt shows what can go wrong.
The actor who played hotshot lawyer Harvey Spectre in US legal drama Suits has interviewed an A&O Shearman partner in a surreal promotion for Harvey, the legal AI product used by the Magic Circle firm.
Gabriel Macht stepped away from acting in 2019 after starring as Spectre in all 134 episodes of the hit show, but he’s now been hired by Harvey to act interested as various lawyers tell him AI is fantastic.
Having to talk to solicitors in order to pay for his new bathroom may have Macht wishing he’d starred in a show about literally anything else, but he still manages a rapt expression as A&O partner David Wakeling explains that he decided to become a solicitor after watching A Few Good Men.
Macht suggests that A&O Shearman was one of the earliest adopters of Harvey, and earns his paycheck by pretending to look surprised when Wakeling replies that in fact A&O was the first to ever do it.
Wakeling, who is now A&O Shearman’s Head of AI, tells Macht that he persuaded A&O to pay for Harvey by giving a demo to its Senior Partner (which would have been Wim Dejonghe, by RoF’s calculations). “I slid an iPad across the table and said, ‘Ask it any question you want’.”
According to Wakeling, the Senior Partner asked Harvey a couple of questions (which Wakeling doesn’t disclose) and exclaimed, “This is astonishing. We need to buy them!”.
Wakeling says he explained that A&O couldn’t buy the company, but could work with it.
He tells Macht that of the thousands of lawyers in the firm, “some were scared of change”, but that when ChatGPT arrived, A&O was prepared thanks to its early adoption, which he says has “totally changed” the practice of law.
“I remember piles of boxes of papers, hammering through them. Hours ticking away. Now the systems can cut through that and you get on to the important stuff” (ie promos with Gabriel Macht).
“I wish I could rewind my career 20 years, it’s so much more fun now”, declares Wakeling, presupposing that he would be one of the lucky lawyers who still gets a job once AI shrinks the white collar workforce to one prompter per 100 clients.
Despite sounding 100% like an AI concept, it was not made with AI: