I remain deeply skeptical of the prospect that AI will “replace” lawyers. The technology keeps making impressive inroads into legal work, but every advancement promises to take tasks off an individual lawyer’s plate, but not to remove the lawyer from the process. It is, as the AI gurus always say, just giving lawyers more time to do the real lawyering. Lawyers will certainly lose their jobs when a firm can produce the same output in half the time, but that’s not really the same as being “replaced.”
But the problem with a model that places more importance of seasoned professional judgment, is making sure law firms have a pipeline of seasoned professionals. Because despite Biglaw partners thinking they’ll live forever and rushing to kick down the ladder to strand their younger colleagues in dead end income partner roles outside the equity bounty, eventually new blood has to take over.
What will this new blood look like in an AI-driven world? Over the course of Legalweek, this topic kept coming up. No one seemed to have an answer.
AI creates two big problems for law firms, making the development funnel both smaller and less robust.
If fewer lawyers are required to do the work, the firm hires fewer lawyers. For an industry based on a glorified pyramid scheme, fewer junior lawyers means fewer future senior lawyers. In the short-term, firms will bridge this gap with lateral hiring, but when everyone in the market cuts back, the talent pool becomes a piranha frenzy. And some firms are going to show up after the carcass is fully picked over.
Some folks brush this off by reminding us that everyone doesn’t have to go to Biglaw — which is the “just cut back on the avocado toast and you can own a home” of legal. Of course, not everyone has to go into Biglaw, but the lawyer-industrial complex requires a LOT of students go into Biglaw. Tuitions must be paid. And those public service jobs are subsidized by the people willing to pay sticker prices. If the most expensive schools can’t necessarily place their graduates in top salary jobs, there will be fewer top-tier applicants, which just exacerbates the problem. Because the law schools aren’t likely to shrink… they’ll make their nut by bringing in more students who would otherwise go to less expensive schools.
Then they’ll come out deep in debt with fewer jobs available to cover that cost.
As hiring and retention becomes more intense, firms have to grapple with teaching judgment to juniors who outsource most of their thought processes to AI. One Legalweek attendee recounted the second-hand story of a top litigator worried that she’s increasingly seeing AI-produced drafts and that her markups are just being dropped back into AI to make all the changes. Has the junior actually learned anything? And, in some ways, this isn’t new. In past decades, a junior could hand the markup to an assistant or word processing department to integrate. But word processing couldn’t deal with that margin note asking for more research or giving general direction like, “rewrite in light of page 4 comments.” The AI tool will actually take a stab at that.
And it’s not just the act of entering edits because the process itself taught a lesson. “We had the one or two partners that we worked with a lot, and we put together memos, and they threw it back at us, with a bunch of red, and said, ‘what the hell is this?’” Oyango Snell, Executive Director of CLOC told me. “It made us better attorneys. And it made us better in communications. It made us better at how we manage business affairs with clients, because we understood the pressures that those partners were on when they would have to go and interact with that client.” The iterative nature of editing — turning that document 10 times and seeing the partner pick up on problems left completely untouched three turns ago — taught lessons about prioritization and how an argument comes together holistically.
When a rams through all those steps and puts out something vaguely finalized in one go… how keenly will senior lawyers engage in the iterative process? A lot of thinking took place across those turns — and the interminable waits in between — that doesn’t necessarily happen when AI skips over those steps. I sometimes talk about AI as a “smart, yet clueless associate” and while that’s usually a warning not to trust its research, it also raises the prospect that partners could bypass the associates altogether. If the aforementioned litigator really believes the juniors aren’t learning from the experience and AI makes the changes faster… well, the partners have equal access to ping the AI to enter their changes.
New research suggests Gen Z is dumber than the prior generation. They shouldn’t shoulder the blame for this. There’s a lot going on there — including a pandemic that kept a bunch of them out of class during formative years — but one area I’ve anecdotally noticed is that these students don’t take notes. The combination of technology and busybody helicopter parenting gave rise to a generation taught by Powerpoint decks that schools could post to keep parents unnecessarily in the loop about multiplication tables. As a consequence, students just ask for access to the slides rather than write down the information themselves. Writing things down improves memory and cognition, and this generation hasn’t been taught to do it.
Lately, I’ve started to worry that AI in legal could take on a role similar to those slide decks. The first generation — who already have some skills under their belts — enjoy the new tech as perk, blissfully unaware that the next cohort will suffer for it.
There’s a rosy AI-enhanced future for lawyers, where seasoned professionals manage more matters than ever before with AI doing all the tedious lifting while letting “lawyers be lawyers.” But that future rests on the idea that someone at the top of the pyramid has the training and judgment to shepherd the agent swarm. Those people are there right now, but what happens in 10-20 years? Will there be enough lawyers with enough know-how to get the job done?
That’s the question no one seems ready to answer. Or even seriously grapple with.
Earlier: Andrew Yang Says AI Is Replacing Biglaw Associates, Which Is Great News For Malpractice Lawyers
Has AI Managed To Make Lawyers Even Dumber?
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.
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