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Enthusiast
I’m a ninth year associate and AI can’t do anything that I’m doing. Clients still will need to pay for juniors to get trained so they will have mid and senior level associates to do the harder work. That has always been the case and there have been many technological improvements before.
I will say AI is better at doing the junior tasks, but it still isn’t great. It should be making you more efficient for sure, but it is not fully replacing you. You need to be reviewing everything that it is generating/doing for you. As a junior, I feel like there is an opportunity for you to be doing the work of 3 or 4 juniors if you are using the tools efficiently, but it isn’t replacing you.
This AI is replacing us stuff is totally overblown.
Using the same AI tool? The improvement in the last month has been wild.
Coach
Great thread, strong associate work product—claim an AI tool is ready to take over all work but cannot identify an AI tool that is ready to take over all work. Probably the same associates that claim they were fired for politics or low hours when it was their poor performance.
Nobody on this thread made any claims about getting fired for politics or low hours. This discussion is about AI. Have you considered being less weird and hostile?
No it can’t. If it can, you’re severely behind.
I use it consistently as a supplement for probably 80% of my deals. It is nowhere near replacing me, though.
Enthusiast
I think we’re still a few years away from at least partial junior replacement, or otherwise hiring less juniors in general. I don’t doubt AI’s ability to help us with certain technical tasks, but right now, the articles discussing AI’s impact on law swear that AI’s ability to summarize a contract or law is proof of imminent replacement. That’s such a little part of what we do. Right now, clients value human advice and relationships, and absolutely do not trust AI for high-level, custom legal advice/oversight on their issues.
Thank you, A5. AI will help improve efficiency maybe 10 to 15% but it can only help with a relatively small portion of the job.
As a litigator, I’m begging for AI to take over the entire discovery process. I’m not sure if AI will ever be taking depos or going to trial.
At some point, if if hasn’t already, document review will become easier. AI already making Depo summaries and fact analysis easier. The things most litigators don’t enjoy about litigating will become more efficient. Then we can spend more time doing the things we enjoy. The legal industry will do what it always does - protect itself.
But if we spend less time on mundane tasks, that’s less billable hours. That’s totally OK provided firms reduce hour requirements, though what firm management and partners would do that im not sure any would.
Enthusiast
It’s always the young associates that think technology is going to replace all our jobs. You just haven’t worked with enough partners who make more in a year than you will make in your entire career who don’t know how to convert a PDF and still handwrite all their time entries to know that just isn’t true.
We’ve gone from everything on paper with no internet and bicycle messengers flying down Lex and Park and hunkering down at the printers to make last minute changes to docs to everything online and lightning fast comms and the only difference is that a bunch of paralegal jobs disappeared and profits increased.
Yeah I think if you do more transactional law maybe that’s true but for litigation type law probably not. The whole hallucinated/incorrect legal cases is not going to fly when filing documents with the court. Then you have sensitive client documents you don’t want to disclose to random third party entities unless it’s expressly deemed to be part of the law firm’s software for fear of an ethical violation.
@associate also there’s settlement negotiations and trying to factor in litigation elements that can make a case stronger or weaker such as a judge’s own inclinations, the experiential knowledge of which legal arguments tend to work more often versus, a plaintiff’s own personal situation such as financial troubles, and some legal practices are not really codified into any real database and thus can’t be used by an AI tool to properly judge the strengthen of a case.
Coach
Let me see AI sit through a page turn call. Would gladly pass that off to a robot colleague.
As a mid level who finished drafting MTD, AI can’t do that job. AI can’t show up to a depo or court hearing or present at trial. So, nothing negative happen to my job except the tedious work - depo summaries, discovery, etc becomes more efficient
Circle back when AI drafts competent briefs and shows up to court hearings and depositions. The same people worried about AI taking a significant amount of real lawyering jobs are the same people who worried that google and email would destroy the practice of law when in fact those advances made it better
Do you let your AI pick up the phone and berate people and try to make them feel self conscious and at fault?
This is my favorite part of the job and I haven’t found an AI that can do it adequately.
I have messed around with AI, not using any particular care with regard to prompting, providing context, or using a tool specialized for legal work. (I don’t use identifiable facts or data.) Even with those constraints, at least for research projects and the like, it blows away what any of my associates can do, and it is neat, virtually free, doesn’t have a cat that gets sick, and so on. It is pretty good at running redlines, too. I also have heard Claude’s new legal plugin is quite good in that regard. It’s pretty scary. I don’t offer this with glee at all. I wouldn’t want to be starting out right now or in law school.
Mentor
People who dont think say thougtless machine can replace them; details at 11
Law firms that say we can do this for less are going to lose that differentiator.
Lawyers that don’t use AI will be left behind. Top down.
I don’t think we understand how disruptive the technology is and will be as it evolves.
Many practices churning hours just on process that an AI model can do more efficiently. 3 days of work into a few hours and then a final quality check from a partner before the work goes out the door.
And the value of partners? Can you build meaningful relationships. Can you build trust.
AI is going to disrupt to the entire economy to the point things begin to break down. Legal industry is somewhat insulated but at least my firm is convinced that the billable hour is going out the door in medium term — hard to imagine that doesn’t lead to people losing their jobs.
The economy will almost assuredly shrink when a sizeable percentage of white collar middle class jobs are lost to AI agents and people will react as you might expect. I think you’ll see people pushing states/countries to begin legislating AI out of the workforce by 2028 and it being a major topic in the debates.
I think the other consideration is if/how OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, will change *their* price point.