Last weekend, I had the privilege of convening with twenty young legal minds from our expansive international network for a focused discussion on AI and its impact on the legal profession. Our discussions were insightful, reflecting on how AI is reshaping the role of lawyers in the modern legal landscape.
One clear theme that came out of our dialogue was all the ways we can use AI within the legal domain. From streamlining document review processes to enhancing predictive analytics in litigation, the applications of AI are vast and ever-expanding.
However, what truly caught our attention was not merely the current state of AI in law, but rather its potential trajectory in the years to come and the resulting changes to the career arcs of young lawyers.
The Role of Lawyers in an AI-Driven Environment
The senior echelon of the legal profession offers nuanced services, contrasting with the less varied tasks often associated with junior roles. As automation increasingly streamlines law firm operations, routine tasks once handled by junior associates may diminish, while client interaction and strategic decision-making persist.
Amidst this shift, the essence of lawyering may reside in understanding clients' complex issues and interpreting ambiguous legal scenarios—realms where human judgment will remain paramount for the foreseeable future.
We coined the term "last-mile lawyers" to represent those future professionals who will be tasked with integrating technological innovations into legal practice, navigating the intersection of human judgement and astonishingly good machine-delivered strategies, research, call summaries, and briefs.
Envisioning Future Law Firms: "Woven Authority"
Consequently, as our discussions ranged over the legal profession ten years hence, we speculated on how traditional hierarchies may be forced to give way to a more decentralized apprenticeship and service model.
We discussed how future lawyers may embody what we called "woven authority" – a collaborative approach that leverages collective expertise and diverse perspectives into dynamic hierarchies – maintaining adherence to top-down directives, but allowing the “top” to change places as needed.
Without this shift, junior lawyers may struggle to develop the nuanced judgment required for legal practice, even as they bring valuable technological skills and adaptability to the table. In a “woven authority” model, junior lawyers would also be challenged. That challenge would be a more exciting one: to simultaneously educate their senior counterparts while learning when to pivot to defer to their seniors’ experience, in order to learn traditional legal domains.
Implications for Access to Justice
We also discussed AI’s promise of enhancing efficiency while greatly amplifying the impact of legal advocacy.
If a lawyer learns to recognize subtle details early in their career and can identify and resolve key complexities in a client's situation with a swift instruction to their AI assistants, that lawyer could potentially handle an order of magnitude more client cases.
There’s the tantalizing prospect of significantly greater equity and inclusivity when legal services are distributed much more widely. The implications of this paradigm shift extend beyond our profession, signaling at some broadly beneficial changes in society as a whole.
Embracing Change
Yes, an AI drafted the initial version of this article and provided feedback on the final draft. (Without an AI intern, I don’t think I would have used a phrase like "ten years hence.") As we chart a course towards this increasingly AI-enabled future, we obviously need to embrace change with adaptability and foresight. Established professionals must invest in this evolution, while new generations seize the opportunity to guide it.
Our profession is being tested. Will established lawyers resist change with the smug knowledge that the last profits of an old business model will stay with us, or will we learned to perpetually assess and harness new ideas by apprenticing: distributing our control and investing all our hard-won resources in a new generation of lawyers?