1y ago

Does the quantity of lawyers actually makes a difference?

When they say that "they have an army of lawyers" or that Disney has more lawyers than animators and things like that, do they tho? Is an army of lawyers really effective? Do companies actually have an "army" of lawyers to redact and sign documents?

31 comments

Basically it means that they can handle lots of cases at the same time while still giving each one as much attention as it needs. Winning or losing a difficult case can often be decided by how much time and expertise you can put into it. When you have a lot to lose, would you rather have a team of lawyers, each specializing in a different aspect that’s relevant to the case or a single lawyer who is overworked because he‘ll have to prepare a different case after lunch?
Edit: typo
- I would imagine it's only matter of time before AI can do the majority of the work for law firms. I'll have to ask my IP lawyer friend about this.
  
  Lawyers who has tried to use AI so far had lost their cases miserably.
  
  Yes lots of contract and doc review billable hours are going to go away. It’s going to be devastating.
  Doc review is pretty awful though so maybe it’s for the better.
  
  All AI does is determine the probability of the next word that's about to be said.
  There definitely will come a time when an AI can craft legal thought, but it is a long, long time off.
  Source: I'm a legal tech who's actually helping my firm test legal gen AI platforms, all of which produce information that can't be relied upon without human validation.
- The scope and visibility of the case is important, as well. Complex cases require lots of lawyers with different specialties to look at it from different angles.
  Similar in engineering, you want more engineers working on a really big and complex project than just one person. I worked with a firm back in the day that designed a stadium - they had a whole floor of their HQ devoted to engineers who only worked on that project.
IANAL, but I watch a lot of legal eagle on nebula.
It's about research capacity. Finding applicable case law can take a fair amount of time. Maybe less with AI, unless you start citing the AI case law https://duckduckgo.com/?q=AI+generated+case+law, but you need to know how other cases went, if you want to create a successful strategy for your own case.
- IANAL
  🤤
  
  I genuinely don't know why people use that obviously charged acronym instead of just NAL.
In addition to what other comments are saying, not only do they have a lot of lawyers, but they also have large legal budgets. They can afford to keep cases in limbo, appeal cases, and cost people a lot of money regardless of the legal or moral reality of what was done.
- Was going to say the same thing. This is the exact M.O. of the former US President, along with many many corporations. With the former, it’s why he never seems to be held accountable for the clearly illegal stuff he does/has done. With the latter, it’s why only a class action or the DOJ are capable of getting any legal satisfaction out of them - and even then it’s usually laughable.
It's not about reacting and signing documents. An army of lawyers is useful because it allows more stuff to be done simultaneously. More people can do research on potentially relevant case law, more lawyers can write multiple different motions. This forces opposing counsel to have as many or more lawyers to react to all this.
An army of lawyers also means you can have teams all dedicated to specific tasks. Disney has lawyers that likely have decades of experience in defending against personal injury suits in their parks. That makes it far harder for anyone to succeed without a very good case.
At the scale of Disney, they likely have dedicated legal teams to many things, and even subsections of those. Take the film division for example, there are likely legal teams for copyright, contracts for services, contracts for advertising, general labor law, acting/directing contracts, location acquisition, property rental/purchase, and distribution. The same goes for the several other divisions.
Lawers, guns, and money.
More is better.
I'll have to note that afaik it matters more in countries with common law practices.

31 comments