When Efficiency Meets the Duty to Verify: Reflections on The Verification-Value Paradox

The Verification-Value Paradox states that increases in efficiency from AI use “will be met by a correspondingly greater imperative to manually verify” the outputs. The result is that the net value of AI in many legal contexts may be negligible once verification is honestly accounted for. For low-stakes tasks, verification costs are light. For core legal work, verification costs are heavy. That’s the tension.

8 minute read January 01, 2026 at 12:17 AM
By
Leigh Vickery
When Efficiency Meets the Duty to Verify: Reflections on The Verification-Value Paradox

Every few weeks, someone asks me a version of the same question:

“When will generative AI finally shave 20% off our legal bills?”

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