Law Land in general, and BigLaw in particular, has a firmly established and proud custom of not being the first. To almost anything. I say this based on personal experience, because the almost invariable response to a novel proposal is, “Who else is doing it?” And if the answer is no one or no one of consequence, no firm will agree to be the first.
Step back for a moment and contrast this to floating a new idea to a heads-up business person. If the answer to “Who else is doing it?” is no one, then hallelujah, let us be the first!
If this sounds about right to you, then I have good news. The leading management consultancies of the world have recognized, as the FT put it in a recent front-page story, that McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, among other name brands, have frozen entry-level salaries for now three years in a row. More to the point for our purposes, these firms are “reconsider[ing] their traditional ‘pyramid’ structure.” Meanwhile, the Big Four (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC) have been even faster out of the blocks, with zero raises since 2022 and a shift in its hiring mix away from MBAs and towards engineers.
And it’s not just a shift in the mix, it’s fewer new hires, period, as AI increases human productivity. According to two unidentified “senior executives at Big Four firms,” overall graduate recruitment in the UK will be down by half this coming year. To be blunt about it, “you might be in a better place investing in AI and offshoring than in people.”
And at least in consulting-land, clients are pushing for more and earlier AI adoption:
“Clients are quite legitimately asking, what are you doing?” said Rob Hornby, co-chief executive of the consulting firm AlixPartners. “That’s become a new credentialisation, to explain how you are applying AI to your firm.”[1]
So what about our own back yard, Law Land?
Here we owe you, Dear Reader, an apology rolled up with an explanation by way of mitigation: To a large extent the reason you have not seen more on this topic here at Adam Smith, Esq. is because no one knows. And staying loyal to our profession’s impregnable insistence on “sometimes in error but never in doubt,” commentators on the trajectory of AI have divided into espousing two radically different scenarios:
- AI in Law Land will change nothing—not practice techniques, not hiring models or career trajectories, not billing or revenue conventions, not client relations or lawyer mobility—
- or it will change all of those economic dimensions of the practice to an almost unrecognizable degree.
We are planting our flag in the second camp.
Every new technology heretofore, from word-processing to e-discovery, has changed, in large ways or small, the way lawyers do what they do, but has not even tweaked the composition of the tasks themselves, nor the bedrock reality that human beings are running the show. For our purposes today, the historic composition of the team of professionals addressing the client’s issue—paralegals, associates, partners, business professionals, outside experts, etc.—is immaterial. They’ve all been people, humans if you will.
GAI has already changed that and will continue to do so at an irreversible and accelerating pace. Fine, you may be saying, but how so? In other words, what does this mean for me?
One of the sanest essays we’ve seen on this comes from Bloomberg Law and their new (to them and to us) columnist, Eric Greenberg. (Eric is EVP, GC, and Corporate Secretary of Cox Media, after a tour of duty in private practice. He was educated at Tufts and GWU Law and won the FT Innovative Lawyers Award in 2016.) Here’s the pith of Eric’s remarks:
Artificial intelligence will commoditize an entire segment of legal practice. And perhaps sooner than we think, it will strip away the analytical work that has long defined the profession—document review, precedent research, inconsistency detection, first-draft generation. The disruption will be profound.
And it may be the best thing that could happen to the future of the profession.
Because what AI can’t replace is more valuable: strategic judgment, the capacity to advise under uncertainty, the human creativity that transforms analysis into direction. A moat will protect this work, but only if we’re prepared
The thick bright line between what AI can do in the realm of legal practice and what only human beings can do is the difference between analytical acuity (AI) and judgment undergirded by lawyer/client trust resting on a shared history of experience and EQ. As Eric puts it in a slightly different context (this guy can write! Hat tip to him): “The young lawyer [now, AI] generates, the seasoned lawyer metabolizes [emphasis mine].”
Big fat caveat: This transformation requires rethinking and recreating the time-honored career path of human lawyers. Our lengthy and shockingly uneconomic years of apprenticeship before we can generate financially material contributions to the law firm’s P&L will have to be drastically condensed, accelerated, and re-engineered.
Not all firms will make it.
The Hon. AI Judge
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/2b15601b-8d02-4abe-a789-7862874042be?shareType=nongift
