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.”
The jobs won’t necessarily go because the use of AI means it takes less time to produce something. The jobs will go when the clients demand the use of AI to justify paying a lower fee.
However, anyone with a modicum of perspective would see the incoming subscription model was always going to happen. The only difference is that some firms (or perhaps more specifically, some teams/people in firms) will be more dependent upon using AI for their work product and find it harder to unwind when they realise it hits their bottom line worse than a useless NQ would.
Clients are demanding less junior lawyer costs on files citing AI options. They are right. AI is weak on judgment calls, but it is great at grinding out the dull stuff to get tot eh stage of the judgment calls. The clear answer is a significant reduction in entry level lawyer numbers and that is where we are heading.
I hope that the examples of lawyers being stupid and getting caught citing fake cases confirm that you still need a lawyer to apply their trained mind in order to use AI to do legal work.
For that reason, I agree that AI is an enhancement for lawyers who already know what they are doing, but I don’t think it follows that it is a replacement for those who do not (at least not yet).
I strongly disagree with the view that AI is an evil bogeyman hellbent on slaying the careers of otherwise diligent and honourable lawyers.
The chronology of examples of lawyers getting caught out provides some insight into the progress that AI is making.
The early examples occurred in circumstances where no one really understood how LLMs worked, nor that they were capable of hallucinating (and they were hallucinating hard). It was certainly easier to understand how someone could get caught out.
As time has gone on, the mistakes (a generous term) have become increasingly indefensible. Not only should people have learnt from the earlier examples, the models have also improved such that it is a lot more difficult to go wrong (see the recent PM case).
I think Copilot has come a long way but I am particularly impressed with Claude. It’s research and drafting is top notch. I feel it is incapable of producing slop. That may be wrong but it doesn’t matter because, importantly, I do not submit my will to it and I still check everything.
I probably should have some concerns about how exponentially AI is improving, but we’re a long way from letting AI do things unaided. And anyway, I have long harboured a secret desire to return to my Saturday job at the garden centre.