My friend Sarah trains trainee solicitors at a mid-sized firm in Manchester. We were sat in her kitchen a few months ago, her marking a stack of contract reviews, and she said something that stuck with me: "The first two years of this job used to be how you learned to think like a lawyer. Now a machine does most of it in an afternoon, and I genuinely don't know what I'm meant to teach them instead."
She wasn't being dramatic. She was worried about real people — the twenty-three-year-olds sitting in her training room, who'd taken on enormous debt and a hard exam on the promise of a profession that might be reshaping itself under their feet.
That conversation is the one I keep having about AI and law. Everyone wants to talk about whether the technology is impressive. I'd rather talk about who it changes.
The people who used to do the grunt work
For decades, the path into law ran through tedium. You read the boring documents. You checked the citations. You sat in a windowless room with a discovery pile that could bury a small car. It was awful, and it was also how you built the instinct that tells a senior lawyer, years later, that something about this clause is off.
AI is extremely good at the tedium. Ranking documents by relevance, flagging the odd clause, pulling together a first-draft memo — the tools now do in hours what used to consume a junior's week. Sarah's right that this is brilliant for clients and brutal for the apprenticeship.
I don't think the answer is to protect busywork for sentimental reasons. Nobody became a great lawyer because they spent a fortnight cross-referencing. But firms that adopt the tools and shrug at what happens to their juniors are making a choice about the next generation of partners, whether they admit it or not. If the machine reads the first pile, somebody senior has to deliberately teach the judgement the pile used to teach by accident.
The paralegals worry me more, honestly. A lot of that work was the document-heavy middle. When a firm tells me it's "automating low-value tasks," I always ask: low value to whom? There's a person attached to those tasks, and they had a mortgage last I checked.
The citations that weren't real
You've probably heard about the New York lawyer who, in 2023, filed a brief stuffed with case law a chatbot had simply invented. Six cases. None of them existed. The model produced them confidently, in perfect legal formatting, because that's what these tools do — they're built to sound right, not to be right.
I find this story less funny than most people do, because it's not really about one careless lawyer. It's about a tool that lies fluently to anyone who stops reading carefully. And the people most likely to stop reading carefully are the overworked, the under-supported, and the ones doing high volumes of low-margin work — which often means the lawyers serving people who can't afford much.
So the rule is simple and it isn't optional: a human checks every authority, every time. Not because the regulator says so, but because the alternative is your client's case collapsing on a citation nobody bothered to open.
The bit nobody markets: access to justice
Here's where I actually get excited, and it's not the part the vendors put on the slide.
Most people in this country who have a legal problem — an unfair eviction, a benefits decision, a dodgy employer — never see a lawyer at all. They can't afford one. They sit in their kitchen, like Sarah and me, except the stack of papers in front of them is a court form they don't understand and a deadline they're terrified of missing.
A tool that helps a person understand what a letter means, or draft a coherent response, or work out whether they even have a case — that's not "low value." That's the difference between someone defending themselves and someone giving up. The free advice centres I've spoken to are cautiously hopeful about exactly this, as long as the thing is honest about its limits and doesn't pretend to be a solicitor.
That's the use I'd fund first. Not because it's the most profitable — it obviously isn't — but because the people it helps are the people the legal system has been failing for years.
What I'd say to Sarah's trainees
If I could stand in front of that training room, I'd tell them this. The machine is coming for the parts of the job that were never the point. The judgement, the reading of a room, the moment you tell a frightened client the truth they don't want to hear and then sit with them in it — none of that delegates to a model. Lean hard into the human bits, because they're about to become the whole job.
And to the firms: adopt the tools, by all means. But decide what you owe the people they displace and the people they're meant to serve, before the efficiency case writes that answer for you. That part has never been a technology question.
