A tech entrepreneur’s 12-minute rant on a recent Law Punx podcast cuts through legal AI marketing nonsense. Antti Innanen, who founded Dot. after practicing law for several years, said what I have been thinking: the idea that AI will free us all up to do high-end strategic work is mostly bullshit.
This notion masquerading as a truism sounds good. We like it. We want it to be true. It alleviates the need to worry about what AI is doing to our profession. It assures we will all have jobs in the future gazing out the window and thinking all day. And getting paid vast sums of money to do so. It’s in every press release and white paper from vendors.
But I’ve been saying for some time that the future is not all that rosy. That this truism is fundamentally flawed. So I was pleased to listen to an interview of Antti Innanen on Law Punx. Innanen is a tech entrepreneur who has founded several companies.
More importantly, like me, Innanen actually practiced law for several years. He (and I) knows what it means to be a lawyer. We know what lawyers actually do day in and day out. And like me, he thinks the idea that AI and automation will free us all up to do the high-end work is, to be blunt, mostly bullshit.
The Innanen “Rant”
In a roughly 12-minute “rant” as he called it, Innanen made the following realistic key points:
• The reality is that most legal work is just work. It’s not tedious, it’s not high-end strategic stuff. It’s just regular work. What happens when it’s replaced?
• Even if you accept the premise that you can separate the strategic work from the regular work, what happens to the lawyers with time on their hands?
• High-end strategic work is hard. It takes incredible focus and an absence of distractions. You can’t do it eight hours a day, day in and day out.
• Most high-end strategic work will go to the specialists in their fields. The senior partners. It’s not going to go to the associates or midlevel lawyers.
• The reality? There is not an infinite queue of high-level work waiting for us. What will happen when the tedious and regular work is gone and those without the capabilities to do the high-end work have little to do?
• If we truly believed the truism, then we should be racing to develop the necessary skills in our workforce. We should all be learning how to do the strategic work since that’s all we may have left. But we aren’t. We aren’t in law schools or in law firms.
• We can’t trust the vendors who constantly spout the truism in effort to allay fears and sell products. The only reason they aren’t offering products that can do strategic work now is that the tools aren’t there yet. But the minute they are, rest assured vendors will start trumpeting them. The truism is not a moral or ethical commitment on their part; it’s just a technical limitation.
Innanen believes we should be asking hard questions instead of resorting to platitudes that make us feel secure and safe. Nobody, he says, is talking about what’s good for the profession. Instead, we are focusing on things like how to write better prompts and features.
Innanen’s observations aren’t just theoretical complaints. They reflect fundamental economic realities we’re ignoring. These are scary observations and uncomfortable questions that few are asking.
But I’ve been saying roughly the same thing for some time.
Reality Number One
Here’s the reality. Law firms built an economic powerhouse around a simple formula: more associates billing more hours equals higher profits. That’s why firms impose 2,000-hour minimums and hire first-year classes by the dozens.
But this model depends on there being work to do. And like Innanen says, much of that work is just work. Some of it is tedious, much of it is boring. But most is billable.
But much of it will become non-billable or at least not billable in the way it is now. The reality is we won’t need that many lawyers. The reality is the leverage model won’t work when AI does the regular work. That’s an economic reality we need to accept and plan for.
But law firm management focuses on costs and distributing the maximum amount of partner profits at year’s end.
Reality Number Two
The second reality is that not that many lawyers and legal professionals are good at the strategy stuff. Look at any law firm: there are superstars that bring in business and power the machine. Why? Because they are by and large the ones who can do the strategic stuff. They can see solutions to thorny problems. They are innovative thinkers. That’s why clients flock to them.
But then there is the great mass of lawyers in firms who don’t bring in the work, who don’t come up with the strategies and thinking that clients need. These lawyers play supportive roles.
Why? Because they aren’t good at visioning and strategizing. Or they don’t want to do it and are comfortable where they are. That’s why we have things like nonequity partners. Or those who aren’t on equity partner tracks.
These are the grinders and minders that do the regular work Innanen talks about. But what will they do when that regular work is gone? The high-end strategy work is already being done by others. And there’s not an endless supply of it in any event. Clients aren’t going to pay for high-end thinking that doesn’t solve problems.
Certainly, it is true that for some lawyers, getting the freedom to do high-end thinking will improve their output and service to their clients. Ask any good lawyer if they have time to do all they could to help solve their clients’ problems and they will tell you emphatically no. But those are the high-end talented lawyers who are adapt at strategy, not the lawyers doing Innanen’s regular work.
So even if the idea is sound, we aren’t planning for what it really means.
The Training Conundrum
There’s another fundamental problem with the truism. As Innanen notes, we aren’t training people to step into the new roles. So, all those who have done the regular work for years have no training to do what will be in demand, even if you accept the idea that there will be this great amount of strategic work to do.
Another problem: being able to do high-end work requires critical thinking skills. It requires experience and seeing patterns that can be extended into new situations. Yet today much of that experience is dwindling as AI and automation does more and more.
So even if you believe that AI can never do strategic thinking (I don’t), you are looking at a future where we have a bunch of lawyers who no longer think like lawyers but like lawyer bots.
The Challenge
I wholeheartedly agree with Innanen that law firms and the profession better start asking the hard questions about AI instead of racing to get the newest and shiniest new addition. We need to stop getting AI tools just to say we have them. We need to think long and hard about where we are going.
Innanen’s right when he says lawyers are like cockroaches, we’re survivors. But cockroaches adapt and evolve. They don’t spend decades doing the same thing while their environment transforms around them.
We need to start asking questions of ourselves and AI vendors that are uncomfortable. Questions like what does it mean for our workforce when what they do will be automated? What new skills should we be developing in our workforce? What will our business model look like when the leverage model is gone, replaced largely by AI?
And maybe most importantly, what will it mean to be a lawyer and legal professional in the future? What will our new value proposition be?
Let’s start asking hard questions instead of business as usual.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.
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