I keep seeing opportunities for lawyers to get paid to train AI, and every time I see one, I have the same question: why are lawyers doing this for an hourly rate?
I understand why it sounds attractive. You know the law, a technology company needs people who know the law, and they’re willing to pay you well for a few hours of your time. Pretty straightforward transaction.
Except I don’t think they’re really buying your time.
They’re buying everything you learned in law school, everything you learned actually practising, the judgment that came from years of clients, files, hearings and cases, and the processes you spent years refining so something that once took you days now takes you hours.
That’s not an hour of expertise. That’s years of expertise being delivered in an hour!
And they aren’t buying it to use once. They’re using what you know to help build a scalable product they can potentially monetize over and over again.
If this were your client, what would you tell them?
This is the part I find fascinating.
If a client came to you with incredibly valuable IP or specialized knowledge and told you another company wanted access to it to help build a product potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, would your first question really be, “What are they paying you per hour?”
Or would you start asking what rights they’re getting, how they’re going to use it, and whether your client should participate in the upside?
Licensing, revenue share, royalties, equity…something?
I have a hard time believing many lawyers would look at that deal for a client and only negotiate the hourly rate. Yet when the valuable thing being sold is their own expertise, somehow that seems to be where the conversation ends.
Someone is getting a very good deal here
I’m not saying lawyers doing AI training are being ripped off. If someone wants to pay you a few hundred dollars an hour for work you enjoy doing, that may be a perfectly good transaction for you. And I’m definitely not suggesting every lawyer who answers a few questions should suddenly own 2% of an AI company.
What I am saying is that I think the two sides of this transaction are valuing completely different things. The lawyer is valuing the hour. The technology company is valuing what it can do with the knowledge acquired during that hour.
One ends when the clock stops, and the other can scale indefinitely.
That’s a VERY good deal for someone, but that someone is not you!
AI changes the economics of expertise
Historically, if you needed help from a lawyer, you had to pay for their time. Their knowledge, experience and judgment came with them. If you needed their help again tomorrow, you paid them again tomorrow.
AI changes that equation.
The entire point of training these systems is to capture knowledge, patterns, processes and reasoning so technology can perform more of the work without requiring the same human input every single time. Which means an expert can be paid once for knowledge that continues creating economic value long after they’ve stopped being paid for providing it.
The hour ends. The value doesn’t.
I think that deserves a very different compensation conversation.
And yes, I own a technology company that asks lawyers questions
Yes, my very own tech company, Lawggle.com, asks lawyers to answer legal questions too.
But when a lawyer answers a question on Lawggle, their knowledge doesn’t just disappear into our system for us to profit. It does the opposite. The answer stays connected to the lawyer who gave it, attributed to them, and builds a body of expertise around their professional identity, not ours. It helps them get found, puts their expertise in front of more potential clients, and gives that knowledge value beyond the moment they took the time to share it, much like a song can keep being streamed long after the musician recorded it.
And yet, we treat the economics of those two things very differently.
No, I’m not suggesting a lawyer owns every legal principle they explain. Obviously they don’t. But the provenance of the contribution still matters. Who did it come from? Who spent years developing the expertise, judgment and experience behind it?
If that contribution is commercially accessed, retrieved or used over and over again to create value, I think the lawyer who contributed it should participate in that value too. That is a principle we intend to build into Lawggle as we explore future commercial uses of the knowledge lawyers contribute.
But the principle is pretty simple… if musicians, writers, photographers and influencers can participate in the ongoing value of what they create, why should professional knowledge automatically be different?
If you help create the value, you should participate in the value. End of story.
Lawyers should be asking who gets the long-term value
I don’t know what the perfect compensation model for AI training is. Maybe sometimes hourly makes complete sense. Maybe other arrangements should include licensing, royalties, revenue share or equity. Maybe an entirely different model will emerge as we figure out what professional expertise is actually worth in an AI economy.
But I do think lawyers should be asking the question.
There is an extraordinary amount of money being invested in technology designed to learn work that historically required professional expertise. If your knowledge is helping create that value, why wouldn’t you at least ask whether you should participate in some of it?
Especially when we keep hearing that AI may eventually eliminate some of the very work lawyers are currently teaching it to do.
Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t.
But if you’re going to spend your time helping a technology company learn how to do some of the work people currently pay you to do, don’t just negotiate the hourly rate. Negotiate the upside. At least if it replaces you, you might own a little piece of the company you helped teach how to do it.
Cara Echino is the founder of Lawggle, a legal discovery platform built to challenge the pay-to-play model of legal visibility. Her work focuses on how lawyers are found, chosen, and trusted, without relying on ads or lead generation, and on the role of AI in supporting, not replacing, legal judgment.
