THE PIE JUST CHANGED HANDS

A friend of mine is a solo-practice attorney. Decades into the law, bills around $500 an hour, and he’s earned it. Last month, five different recruiters called him with the same offer.

Not one of them wanted him to write anything.

They wanted him to review legal work that AI had already drafted. Contracts, filings, the documents he’s spent a career producing from scratch. The AI writes it. He checks it. At his hourly rate.

Here’s how I think about what happened to him, because it’s about to happen to a lot of us.

Picture everything there is to know in his field as a pie. For forty years, my friend held almost the whole pie and his clients held maybe 5% of it. That gap is what $500 an hour buys. You’re not paying for typing. You’re paying for the 95% you don’t have.

AI now holds nearly all of the codified part of that pie. The statutes, the precedents, the standard language, the structures. What’s left for the human is a sliver. But in legal work, the sliver is everything: the difference between a colon and a semicolon in a contract can move real money. Knowing which one belongs there, and being accountable for it, is what my friend still owns.

So here’s the math I walked him through. A document that used to cost a client $2,000, four hours at his rate, becomes a 30-minute review once AI drafts it first. That’s $250. The client saves $1,750. My friend keeps the part of the work that was always the actual value.

My advice to him was simple: take all five offers. The review work is where the value is moving. Standing where the pie used to be doesn’t bring it back.

Someone in one of my mastermind groups made a prediction I can’t stop thinking about. Within five years, a professional might carry liability for NOT having an AI recommendation on record. The standard quietly flips from “did you do your best” to “you’re not allowed to be wrong unless you can show why.” If that’s even half right, the review seat isn’t a demotion. It’s the seat.

Now the part that’s actually about you.

Your business holds a pie too. Whatever your customers pay you for, some of it is codified knowledge, the part that can be written down, and some of it is judgment, the part that comes from your scars. AI is absorbing the codified part on a schedule nobody gets to vote on.

The move is not defending the whole pie. That’s the losing game. The move is finding your colon-and-semicolon sliver, the judgment only you can be accountable for, and building your price around it while AI handles the rest.

My friend’s sliver is the review. He just got five phone calls proving the market will pay for it.

What’s yours?

If you want help finding the sliver in your business, the part still worth $500 an hour after AI takes the rest, let’s talk. 30 minutes, no agenda: kerzie.ai/schedule

Wade Kerzie

Founder, Kerzie AI Solutions

kerzie.ai