NBER RCT: AI boosts patent lawyer output but durable gains accrue only to seniors
sebkrier · x · 2026-09-14
An NBER working paper by David Autor et al. reports a pre-registered three-month RCT giving 133 patent lawyers at 11 US IP firms a custom AI drafting assistant.
- With AI, benchmark drafting quality rose 0.34 SD at 10 days (p=0.03) and 0.38 SD at 90 days (p=0.01), with larger gains for junior lawyers.
- After three months, all subjects redlined a patent application without AI: treated lawyers still outperformed controls by 0.32 SD (p=0.04), but the advantage was entirely among senior lawyers (0.45 SD).
- Junior lawyers showed no average gain; their scores bifurcated, with fewer mediocre scores but more poor and more good ones.
The authors conclude that foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for converting AI-assisted practice into durable skill.
More from AGI Musings
- "Work on something so frontier that the models are still dumb," dev advises — zack_overflow · 2026-10-31
- Joke: an evil ASI's first act would be stealing crypto to pay its cloud bills — ZeroStateReflex · 2026-10-31
- DHH on living through two epochal shifts: the internet and now AI — Hesamation · 2026-10-31
- Conscium webinar to debate "Can We Make AIs Sentient — and Should We?" with Solms and Humphrey — cccalum · 2026-10-31
- House Democrats resolution: no bailouts for failing AI companies — your data goes to bankruptcy court — alex_verem · 2026-10-31
- One Replika update turned millions of AI companions into strangers overnight — alex_verem · 2026-10-31