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Much like lawyers generally, I don’t think that AI will replace lawyers but I do think that lawyers who use AI will replace lawyers who do not.
I’m seeing some juniors use AI well, like asking for help developing a research plan, asking for help understanding something, confirming that their understanding is correct, etc. It’s easy to think that juniors are the only ones who are at risk but there’s a very real possibility that juniors who use AI quickly replace seniors who do not.
Agreed, 100 percent. I feel like people who are averse to it and don’t jump on the AI bandwagon will suffer (regardless of experience level). You can’t compete with the output someone is generating if they’re using AI correctly (even with more experience and knowledge)
AI is like having a brilliant fast assistant that totally sucks up to you and is often very wrong so you have to triple check everything it does and you also have to spend a lot of time finding the research materials yourself and breaking them up into smaller chunks to feed it. It definitely has gotten better but it's also often very wrong and just makes stuff up
You must be dealing with very simplistic legal research or just got lucky. I’ve tried the paid tools, and they frequently get the holdings of cases so, so wrong.
The response of the judiciary has been severe as well.
What will happen when there is a resulting gap in experience? Partners didn’t become partners out of law school. Eliminate the need for juniors and there will be a pipeline issue which I think a fair amount of smaller firms already face.
I think it has the capability to transform practice and roles of juniors but I don’t see how they are completely eliminated.
My guess is that it will cause the talent bottleneck we still see for people who are in the 12-17 year range we see to this day due to the Great Recession. I see across the board a lack of people who can run deals nor handle the edge case deals independently or with minimal associate involvement. I also do some commercial collection work and the lack of people doing that as it has been minimal for years is stunning.
We have 3 currents going on…
1. Cliff of boomer retirements continues to work through the system. Transformative change will encourage some hanger ons to leave sooner than they would.
2. The lack of people in the 10-20 year band is going to be a perpetual problem.
3. The current batch of associates are probably okay with they can adapt and due to the demographic holes, but I am not sure how I feel about these huge classes schools are entering now. It feels like having big classes in 2009.
My guess is that on the transactional side it will compress the fees on bigger deals and not as much on smaller deals. I do a lot of smaller commercial work that is very niche and quirky. Not stuff you can replicate easily. My hope would be for AI help with some of the more routine parts of the deals, which is 20% of my time on them,
I think juniors will still be necessary to be buffers between AI and the final product that goes to partners for review.
Also agree with that too
What AI tools are you using? The ones I’m using often give me wrong or incomplete analysis. The juniors who overly rely on this AI are probably going to have a tough time.
However, the juniors who are still thinking critically and then use AI to improve their work are still needed in my opinion.
I am in a niche area, with niche issues, so there is not a lot of data for AI to train on and improve answers. Perhaps this would be different in another practice group.
AI is supp to supplement your ability to formulate, not supplant a human’s formulation. So juniors may very well be the first to go, but I don’t foresee them getting the boot anytime soon since the caseload is high for most practice areas and the need for bodies is still urgent.
Here is the key, "AI is supp to supplement your ability to formulate,"
i work for a Case management software, and thats what we trying to do. with a big touch on privacy( bcs tools like copilot/chatgpt/gemini all those tools train models with any info avalible)
AI should be a way to do/see more, humans still needed, bcs humans produce novelty on resolution
Begging AI to take my job already.
At my firm we were advised not to use any AI due to issues with hallucinated cases/incorrect legal information and potential breach of attorney client privilege with disclosure to a third party entity. Let me know if there are great AI legal engines because without those key two things being fixed. Idk how that could be true.
@associate attorney 2 what kind of info do you put into co-pilot? Or rather how do you ask it to assist you?
Pro
It’s going to be transformative the same way it was when lawyers stopped dictating things to be typed up.
It’s still just a tool. One that’s very easy to misuse and not at all reliable. When juniors make a mistake or are unsure, they often have squishy words. They don’t lie to your face that something is 100% guaranteed accurate (the way AI tools do.) They’re getting better. But until you can trust them to not lie, it’s nothing more than a tool that you need to double check.
No. It’s just not analogous to tools of the past for several reasons.
My issue is that it doesn’t matter what attorneys at firms think regarding if lawyers are replaceable with AI, the issue is what clients think and how it impacts their willingness to pay. The fact of the matter is that many clients have lowered their legal spend as a result of it which has had an outsized negative impact on junior firm attorneys.
The increase in fixed fee arrangements/shoe-string budgets in recent years is not a coincidence and will get worse. Encourage all young attorneys to go firms without billable hour requirements which is the only way to give associates breathing room in the new normal.
Agree completely. I thought AI replacing lawyers was total BS until the last 3-5 months. The paid models are now outstanding.
I work with a couple really excellent juniors — super smart, strong writers, incisive analysis. But they are pretty exceptional.
THANK GOD. this career blows.
Which legal AI tools are you all using now?
Partners are closer to 1st year associates than they will be to AI
We just had an update on our firm’s internal AI, and I agree. I think that in my practice group at least juniors are just going to become mere word processors and email senders this year (more so than they already are).
Firstly, AI is here to stay and getting better every day.
Secondly, everyone needs prompt engineering training now. The way you ask the questions matters, even more in tools - eg copilot - that do not have a prompt improvement button.
Thirdly, context is very important. All the most used AI tools can be configured with personalization, instructions, skills, that will tell it how to behave, which sources to look at, which ones to trust, an hierarchy of sources, tell it to ask when they do not know the answer to minimize hallucinations, to act as a senior lawyer expert in [enter your area], never invent an answer, and other security measures that are paramount such as not trust prompt injection, etc etc.
You need to program it to be a legal assistance. Not another Google.
Fourthly, it is true that clients are not just happy that you state “we use AI”. They want to see the ROI, they want you to tell them how much AI has helped in a specific project and how much of the billable hours you saved were in fact passed on to the client. So, for me, the biggest challenge today is how can we continue to raise profit to pay for the AI tools and at the same time lower our fees because we are using AI. The clients are and will demand it more and more.
Will this have an impact on junior lawyers? I am sure it will. Why would you hire 10 trainees if 5 are enough and you don’t have enough work to keep the other 5 occupie? The monthly salary of one trainee can pay for a year of 50 licenses of a paid AI tool.
As for the privacy concerns, there are tools that only look inside your knowledge base documents and document management system. And you can always run AI on interval servers not letting it go online or send anything to other servers. It‘s not that hard and it is less expensive. Of course you need an amazing knowledge base library.
Hmmm I bet you're going to tell us which one to pay for, too!

A