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
- Gary Marcus: both 'human extinction in 5 years' and 'everything will be fine' are wrong — GaryMarcus · 2026-09-14
- A growing intuition: normal-looking worlds in 30 years exist because of a pause — EigenGender · 2026-09-14
- Sam Altman lays out the two ways AI progress could go badly wrong: losing control and power concentration — sama · 2026-09-14
- Spotify Paper: AI Agents Are Becoming the Primary Consumers of Recommendations — _reachsumit · 2026-09-14
- Open Letter to Amodei and Altman Challenges Frontier AI Slowdown Calls: State Keeps Moving — AryHHAry · 2026-09-14
- Can von Neumann probes avoid value drift at relativistic scales? — louisvarge · 2026-09-14