When Baker McKenzie announced plans to cut roughly 700 business services staff, the firm pegged some of the blame squarely on AI, feeding into the technology-fueled paranoia surrounding artificial intelligence. It certainly doesn’t help that the AI hype cycle turns on tech gurus juicing up their VC sugar daddies with promises that AI will replace human workers any moment now, even though AI agents can’t reliably do much more than accidentally delete a whole computer and then apologize for it. I don’t know if Baker McKenzie really believes it can replace 700 staff with AI or if blaming the bots just provides a convenient excuse for general management missteps, but either way it’s not a great sign for the remaining team.
And, of course, the headlines naturally raise attorney anxiety as lawyers wonder if they’re about to be replaced.
The short answer is that AI isn’t replacing Biglaw lawyers. The long answer is that it might depend on which Biglaw firm we’re talking about.
While the developers hustling for VC cash to heap upon the AI furnace will tell you that “agentic” AI is new and revolutionary, the reality is that agents are still stumbling with multi-stage tasks and the more people try to aim them at higher-level thinking, the more time the “human in the loop” spends fixing the mistakes generated along the way. That’s not to say AI isn’t radically changing business workflows — including legal — but it’s not building robot lawyers. Hell, it’s hemorrhaging money to make the technology hallucinate 1 percent less.
As bots go, AI is charting a sci-fi future path closer to Star Wars. He’s cute and personable and can perform a lot of useful technical tasks, but R2D2 is more or less defeated by a flight of stairs. These AI tools will accelerate your summaries and timelines, but pump the brakes before handing it a case file and turning it loose.
In this way, AI doesn’t replace lawyers, it improves attorney efficiency significantly enough that the firm doesn’t need as many lawyers to produce the same results. That won’t feel any different than “replacement” for the lawyers on the wrong end of that equation, but it’s still a useful distinction. Law firms shaving a few percent off their associate hiring is not the same as the cataclysmic human layoffs that tech futurists warn about. Or, more accurately, that they entice their deeply anti-humanist investors with. Either way, AI will impact hiring at the margins.
Mostly.
Now come the caveats. Adopting AI isn’t going to replace scores of lawyers and spark Biglaw layoffs, but in-house and small firm adoption might. Clients continue to deal with mounting budgetary pressure. If AI allows a deputy GC to handle the matter entirely in-house as opposed to forking over Biglaw rates, that’s a gold star from the board. Even if the job can’t be entirely ported in-house, if smaller firms — at a lower price point than Biglaw — can use AI to give their handful of lawyers the brute force power of a large law firm, they’ll drink some of that Biglaw milkshake.
And that is where Biglaw lawyers stand to get laid off. Not from the internal automation, but from the fleeing revenue.
But this fate won’t strike all firms equally. There are essentially two kinds of firms sitting at the top of the Am Law 100. On one side, you’ve got decently large firms doing incredibly lucrative, high-margin work. These are your Wachtells, your Cravaths, your Davis Polks. These firms boast hundreds of attorneys generating massive revenue per lawyer. Wachtell’s RPL clocked in at $4.47 million on the most recent Am Law 100. It’s a business model built on capturing valuable work from clients ready to spend big for it.
On the other side, you’ve got the megafirms. This is where you’d find a firm like Baker McKenzie. The firm’s sitting at No. 9 on the Global 200 with an impressive $3.4 billion in revenue. But it’s spread across roughly 4,500 lawyers, yielding an RPL somewhere around $721,000. DLA Piper, Dentons, the various Verein Voltrons. These are firms raking in revenue by stationing an office on every continent and leaning on offering clients expertise all over the place. And generating revenue from volume.
One model has a lot more exposure to AI.
The high-RPL firms have clients who already decided they’d rather pay big bucks than shop for a deal. It’s not work a client is eager to take on themselves. If AI speeds up the process, the firm is still going to collect its fees. These are the firms that will trim their future offers but aren’t about to purge lawyers.
On the other hand, when a business model is based around size and volume, efficiency takes a toll. When you’ve built a $3.4 billion business on the premise that clients need 4,500 lawyers scattered across 70 offices to handle cross-border compliance, due diligence, and regulatory work at volume, the math gets ugly fast when technology lets a team of 50 handle what used to require 150. If AI makes lawyers more efficient, that $721K RPL isn’t going to cut it for a lot of those lawyers.
Which should give some pause to all the firms scrambling to merge their way up the revenue charts. But these headcount-and-geography mergers rest on the same volume-dependent operation that AI threatens to hollow out. Not every merger is doomed, of course. Combinations can bring together complementary high-value practices. But when a pair of second-50 firms joins to create a behemoth that suddenly moves them into the top-25… that’s begging for a “harder they fall” narrative.
The Baker McKenzie layoffs this week didn’t involve lawyers, but we received tips over the last few days suggesting a number of junior associates were let go for non-performance reasons. When a firm says it’s “rethinking the ways in which we work, including through our use of AI,” that doesn’t sound like they’re sure they’re finished making changes.
But even as the megafirms consider their exposure to AI advancements, it’s worth considering the Salesforce experience. No company invested more in the agentic AI hype than Salesforce and they laid off swaths of employees accordingly. By the end of 2025, their own studies determined their agents mostly failed and reports surfaced that senior executives at Salesforce determined that they had “massively overestimated AI’s capabilities.”
The risk isn’t that AI is competent enough to replace lawyers, but that there’s a lot of hype out there fooling people into believing that it is. When that sci-fi mythologizing collides with the genuine risks AI presents to a volume-based business model, firms are going to make some overestimations that unnecessarily cost a lot of people their jobs.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.