Hype or threat?
Junior lawyers have been airing their anxieties about artificial intelligence (AI) online, with the responses suggesting the profession is nowhere near agreement on whether the tech is a genuine threat to legal careers as we know them or just another overhyped trend.
Posting on the r/biglaw subreddit, a self described second year transactional associate admitted the job had started to feel like “rubber stamping” now that AI is “eating such a large chunk” of their workload. Tasks like drafting, diligence and summarising documents, long considered essential junior training, were starting to feel “superfluous,” they wrote, before asking whether anyone else was losing job satisfaction over the same thing.
Plenty of people were only too happy to weigh in. One commenter, identifying themselves as a senior associate, did not hold back, predicting that the traditional grind of reviewing documents and passing them up the chain has maybe “10 more years” left in it. A similar view came from another poster, who reckoned a “new regime” was coming, in which AI does the “labour” on routine matters while a single partner signs off at the end.
Others focused on what it might mean for hiring further down the line, with one commenter suggesting firms could end up taking on fewer juniors rather than finding new work to fill their time, going as far as to claim the “pyramid model is dead.”
The uptick in lawyers turning to AI has not been without its problems. Pinsent Masons was recently criticised by a High Court judge after a junior lawyer’s AI assisted research led to the firm citing an insolvency rule that did not exist. Sullivan & Cromwell was similarly forced to apologise to a New York court after AI hallucinated citations turned up in a court filing linked to a major fraud case.
But not everyone in the thread was buying the AI doom, though. One sceptic waved much of the discussion away as “AI propaganda from people who aren’t in biglaw,” while another argued that the leading legal AI tools are, at best, “an above average paralegal.” Useful for a first pass, in other words, but nowhere close to replacing a junior outright.
Elsewhere in the thread, the consensus seemed to be that results depend entirely on who is holding the reins, with one commenter putting it succinctly. AI, they argued, is “an enhancement” for lawyers who already know what they are doing but “a replacement” for those who do not.
Opinion also split along practice area lines, with some seen as far more exposed to AI than others. Several posters argued transactional and M&A work is more exposed, given how document heavy it is, while litigation was seen as safer since advocacy and court appearances stay firmly human. Others were not convinced, pointing out that discovery and legal research, the bread and butter of junior litigation life, are apparently already being reshaped by AI tools.
The original poster returned later in the thread to reassure any nervous incoming law students that the sky was not quite falling in just yet.
“For what it‘s worth, I don‘t think it’s eliminating jobs yet, just making them more boring for the time being,” they wrote. “I’ll also say it’s totally possible they just more quickly graduate juniors to bigger tasks, but because they haven’t figured out a way to do that yet, they have us still doing all of this redundant stuff. Maybe by the time you graduate this will be an engaging job.”