Lawyering In The Age of AI
The Tension Between Caution & Change
Over the past year or so, we’ve been running regular polls on generative AI and the legal profession on LinkedIn.
Thank you to those who contributed - it’s appreciated.
These polls provide signals that shape a part of our overall research into the future of lawyering, especially in understanding where AI is heading, and how lawyers perceive and use it.
What The Polls Reveal
Here’s a summary of what lawyers and legal professionals have been telling us and what then follows is our commentary on what it may mean for lawyers -
Most agree AI is already having a meaningful impact on the legal profession.
Most see advanced AI as the most important emerging technology into the future.
Generative AI is best used for routine automation, though many also see it as a useful thought partner.
Some use GenAI only occasionally - some use it all the time - some not at all.
Quite a lot believe the lawyer’s role is not yet changing due to AI, and most do not see positions being lost to AI yet.
Fit-for-purpose regulation is seen as the top priority for AI adoption, followed by education, training and AI literacy.
A significant number feel there is stigma around using AI professionally.
A majority of legal professionals see legal secretaries and paralegals as the roles most likely to be transformed into the future.
Legal professionals in the main are sharpening their soft skills in preparation for the impact of GenAI.
AI’s Growing Presence In Legal Work
We’re still in the early stages of this technology, but there’s little doubt it is already shifting and changing lawyering.
AI isn’t going away, although some lawyers are still trying to wish it away.
It will undoubtably grow more substantially, improve more substantially and expand more substantially into every part of our day to day lives in society, not just legal work.
Lawyers may in the main be saying “let’s wait and see” in relation to the substantive use of AI, but the rest of society isn’t waiting to adopt AI. This raises interesting questions as to what extent are potential and actual clients of law firms already using AI and if this is in preparation to seeing their lawyers or even more concerningly, the starting to bypass them entirely - like we saw in the beginning of the internet.
There is no sugarcoating it - lawyers, the legal profession and consumers of legal services are and will all be profoundly affected by AI.
In my view, the role of lawyers and other legal professionals is being redefined in real time, in ways we are still only beginning to see and understand. That is what is making the future of lawyering so uncertain, fluid and dynamic, more now than at any previous time before.
The Uncertainty And Experimentation Phase
There seems to be two camps of lawyers and AI. The early adopters and fans - for which lawyers are jumping in, experimenting, testing and starting to adopt AI at scale and then another camp, watching from the sidelines, testing it out on a preliminary and limited basis, deciding it is not yet superior to them and declaring it is as just another flash in the pan.
These are all understandable responses, given the sheer nature of the technological advances, the never ending surrounding hype, the success and failures of the preliminary use cases, the haphazard application of AI to law, the efficiency gains achieved for its uses and also the real concerns over privacy, ethics and information contamination.
Individually, lawyers are therefore responding with a mixture of excitement, disappointment or anxiety as they test it and use it, test it and abandon it or even worse, not test it at all.
At the law firm level, discussion and debates are unfolding worldwide amongst law firm leaders and legal technologists over AI’s impact on administrative support roles, junior lawyers’ work, traditional billing models and how to practically use large language models (LLM) successfully, ethically and safely. Again here at this level, there is a diversity of opinion on its usefulness, how it can be best adopted, its potential superiority with low-level as well as high-value tasks, its failings, regulatory issues, what actual LLM to use, how to upskill and reskill talent and where it this all fits in within the traditional partnership model and legal business structures.
It is becoming clear that lawyers and law firms who can embrace AI strategically, carefully and meaningfully, will undoubtably gain a competitive edge over those who lag behind in its understanding and worse still its uptake. Concerningly if we do not substantively ramp up overall AI literacy, we appear to be heading towards a two-tier lawyer system when it comes to AI and legal services - those who are technologically competent and the rest.
Evolving Lawyer Roles
Saying lawyers need to be technologically competent in AI is one thing, determining what that actually entails, and means, is another, especially given the fluidity of AI. This is indeed proving a challenge for lawyers, law firms, courts, regulators and educators alike.
The adoption of AI increasingly means lawyers and other legal professionals are beginning to start to see their roles shift away from the routine work towards more as verifiers, strategists, ethicists, data managers and gatekeepers of AI agents. It is increasingly clear that the secretaries, paralegals and lawyers of tomorrow will undoubtably be spending a lot more of their time in the future doing different things than what they do now and more supervising and working with intelligent machines. Just how this plays out is currently unclear as to who does what, who the winners and losers are amongst all this, as it is still unfolding right now.
The place and overall dominant function of the modern lawyer in society and the value they bring to their clients, as AI is enacted increasingly at scale, are real and pressing questions. The hardest question to work out right now remains how much routine, repetitive and mundane legal work will still include a lawyer in the loop.
This in turn challenges the profession’s overall identity, how it bills for legal work, its fee and remuneration structures and brings to the fore the role and value of lawyering. If a machine can do it faster, better and cheaper than a lawyer, there will those that argue why bother educate, train or use lawyers for that task? Brutal, yes, but also on point for discussion at least.
Indeed it is worth asking - what is a lawyer for? What value and utility do they bring to clients, who in turn will be using AI more and more for what lawyers currently do. Equally harsh questions that need discussing, answering and strategising for sooner than later.
AI Is More Than Just A Tool
A lot of lawyers out there increasingly recognise and understand that given the above, they must become more high level in advisory work, be more creative, more client-focused, more multi-disciplinary than they have ever been before.
Lawyers will clearly be using AI more and more as a thinking partner and digital assistant. When used prudently, AI can indeed help lawyers think better, test ideas out and gives them unprecedented high level access to technical skill support than ever before.
The challenge here is for lawyers to deliver legal services in a manner where their value proposition to the client is greater than that of AI. That is not straight forward nor easy, as lawyers, with time, will be increasingly competing in a race with advanced AI, with respect to those higher-value tasks now expected of them.
In this brave new world, client relationships, networking, business development and rainmaking take on next level importance and are now roles of everyone in the law firm, not just partners.
At the end of the day, it is clear that AI boosts both productivity and creativity - more the former at this point, than the latter, however the latter should not be under-estimated. The former takes away routine, repetitive and mundane work and replaces it instead with more verification and supervision. The latter does open up a time and space for a new world of predictive, preventative, higher-value and niche lawyering that clients need for the foreseeable future in a complex, uncertain and contested world.
Lawyer Cautiousness
Lawyers remain curious but cautious, waiting for safety signals from broader society, governments, courts and regulators and are overall still questioning (as they should be) how good AI really is.
Pat of that caution is justified especially after the high-profile failures involving fake case citations. Indeed judges are rightly concerned about fake cases being presented to courts and the potential contamination of the common law. An over-enthusiastic blind faith reliance on the output of AI, without proper verification is showing itself to be as problematic as that of not supervising humans properly. The human in the loop aspect is a critical part of the adoption of AI into legal services, and will continue to be so. What that means in still being played out.
A Two-Tier Legal System On The Horizon
Given all of the above, we may be heading toward a two-tier legal system - lawyers using AI for high-value work, as well as AI-first platforms with minimal but necessary lawyer-in-the-loop involvement for more routine matters. This is not just for individual client work, but for that of businesses and corporations as well.
The obvious questions keep recurring and beckon once more. What does it mean to be a lawyer when routine work may never reach you as a lawyer or even human hands? What happens when clients use AI just as or even more independently than their own lawyers?
There is excitement about what AI can do for lawyers, but also concern about what it might do to their livelihoods. Many lawyers are quietly questioning their futures as they see what AI can do and hear the noise around it taking jobs. Professional identity in this environment is in a state of flux. We are at an internet-like moment, where individual and corporate clients may either bypass lawyers entirely and use AI themselves or else use AI first and then come to lawyers to finish what they’ve started. Both scenarios have profound implications for everyone - consumers, lawyers, law firms, regulators and the courts.
Human Led - Maybe For Now
For now, even the lower-level legal work is still human-led but for how long, no one really knows. AI’s rise in law, apart from in BigLaw, has been comparatively slow over the years until ChatGPT came along. It is taking time to be implemented in a profession known for its cautiousness. The current reality regarding the position of AI is therefore mixed. There is no doubt AI is front and centre, but its adoption remains cautious and measured.
Our polling signals that the legal profession is slowly working out AI’s role - balancing risk with opportunity and innovation with tradition.
Advanced AI however is still coming at scale and getting better and better. This will happen both incrementally, and in moments like when ChatGPT landed into the mainstream.
Lawyers are smart and adaptive. The problem is so is AI.
The time to do nothing but sit back and watch and hope for the best is passing.
There is a clear need to do something when it comes to AI and the future of your lawyering.
Your role is to work out what that means to you.
Paul Ippolito is Principal of Ippolito Advisory. He is a legal futurist, lawyer coach and consultant to the legal profession. Paul is available for media enquiries, speaking and consulting. You can contact him here.
