The Future Of Law In Australia And The Coming “Uber Moment” For The Legal Profession

Why AI Is Forcing The Legal Profession To Confront Uncomfortable Realities

“Nobody knows what the industry will look like in five months, let alone five years.”

That line from Janek Drevikovsky’s AFR piece on AI and the legal profession, written against the backdrop of this week’s frenzy around Anthropic’s latest release, really resonated with me and is pretty much bang on.

It’s also one of the best summaries I’ve read lately of where the legal profession actually sits with AI right now.

It doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable issues that we all need to be confronting, post haste.

If you’re a law student, practising lawyer, judge, regulator, legislator or legal educator, grab a coffee and read it properly. Then have a long, hard think about what this means for how we train, supervise, practise and regulate.

I genuinely feel for all of the above because there are no easy answers here, just difficult and more difficult choices, in fluid and uncertain times.

You’ll probably finish the article feeling either slightly helpless or a bit energised. Maybe a bit of both. That probably summarises the state of play neatly. Watch this space.

For what it’s worth, I strongly agree with one of the interviewees quoted in the piece. At the moment, one of the best use of AI in legal practice appears to sit with tech literate senior lawyers, not juniors who do not yet have that professional judgement to properly scrutinise and test its outputs.

Nobody knows what the future of law looks like. Nobody.

But for the first time in a long time, it genuinely feels like the makings of an “Uber moment” for the profession.

It all demonstrates to me how pervasively BigTech has finally arrived at the legal doorstep.

In practice, this really needs senior practitioners and institutions to stay closely and actively involved in what is happening almost day to day.

We live in interesting times.

As I said watch this space.