I think there are a number of reasons lawyers will not be wiped out by AI, including:

– I don’t think we can assume AI takeover is a zero-sum game. The robots will not just simply march in and do what lawyers now do. There will be consequences. Look at email, it made us more efficient. But email has also generated huge amounts of work for lawyers – discovery is now a much larger task than pre-email as there are often thousands of emails that have to be reviewed. AI will have consequences. AI makes the world a more complex place & lawyers thrive on complexity.

– Just because the technology is capable of doing certain things, that does not mean it happens. There is often a significant lag in take up for many reasons, including cost, complexity and resistance to change.

– There is a huge unmet demand for legal services due largely to cost. AI will enable lawyers to provide solutions for that demand at an affordable price.  My business, Lawpath, has served over half a million clients. My guess is that most of those clients probably wouldn’t have gone to a lawyer if they had to pay full freight.

–  AI-powered disputes: GenAI makes legal action cheap. I have a client which, pre-ChatGPT, would get 20+ customer complaints a week, average length of 2 paras & resolved mostly with a 75% off next purchase voucher. Now average length is 2-3 pages of well-drafted legal claims with much greater demands.

In another case, US Treasury released a draft rule in relation to crypto. A bunch of crypto-fans created an AI app that allowed people to make submissions. The agency would normally expect 200 submissions but received (and had to review) 120,000 adverse submissions

– Human nature (sadly) is on our side. People could agree contracts & resolve disputes far earlier than they do – but human nature drives them to want just that bit more.  AI can help with the process but if the other side won’t budge, it doesn’t matter what the machine says, the lawyers need to go to work to bring the parties together

– Human nature (happily) is on our side in another way. Humans don’t surrender to tech, they level-up. Nobel prize winning “Godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton in 2016 forecast the end of radiologists within 5 years because AI would outperform them. Didn’t happen – the number of roles for radiologists in the US has risen at 1.4% annually since 2016 and there is now a global shortage. The radiologists didn’t see how good AI was and just throw away 10 years of training & become baristas. They levelled-up & now use the AI tech to provide greater service to their patients

  • Human nature (again happily) means people crave human experts. We have been able to book travel online now for decades and yet human travel agents are still popular. At Lawpath, we struggled to sell a completely DIY “ask the machine” solution. The success of the business has been due to offering the blend of machine + human lawyer.

All this doesn’t mean lawyers can relax. Lawyers will have to change.

I think the question is not whether lawyers will still have jobs in an AI world but rather:

“When AI Makes Every Lawyer Pretty Good, What Will Set You Apart?”

Link to the podcast: https://youtu.be/i1VKUQGguhc