AI and the rise of the Niche Lawyer

A new legal market will create a new type of lawyer: Specialized, flexible, customized, fractional, home-based and online, exclusive, balanced and focused. This could be your future legal career.

I fractured my toe the other day. Stupidly, as is usually the case with minor injuries — I accidentally kicked the leg of a bathroom cabinet and cracked the little toe on my right foot. I’d never broken a bone before, which is the sort of thing that can be true when you lead a highly sedentary and risk-averse lifestyle.

Two days after the injury, I went to see a chiropractor I sometimes use, who diagnosed the break. A few days after that, I visited my physiotherapist, with whom I’ve been working to rehabilitate an old shoulder injury, for some further treatment. I also consulted a kinesiologist with whom I do strength training once a week. Thanks to the help I received from all these specialists, as well as the doctor at the clinic I eventually saw, the break has gradually been healing.

A couple of things make this anecdote halfway relevant to this article about the legal sector. One is that each of these professionals gave me personal care and attention, based on the relationships we've developed over the months and years we’ve worked together. The other is that each of them works in a small suburban professional space, in tandem with a few other colleagues — I didn’t visit any of them in a multi-floor downtown office building at a BigPhysiotherapy or BigKinesiology firm.

From this unexpected tour of The Health Professionals of Ottawa West, I think I glimpsed an outline of the future for many legal practitioners. Artificial intelligence is likely to radically reshape the legal employment landscape, and a lot of lawyer jobs we once took for granted could disappear. But as the nature of the services lawyers provide evolves and upscales with AI, I think the business model for the individual legal professional will also evolve and upscale — to everyone’s benefit.

If you've read my previous entries on Gen AI and the law, you’ll know the broad outline of my assessments and predictions in this area:

• AI eventually will massively compress and accelerate the performance of countless legal tasks, undermining associate leverage and diminishing the economic rationale for law firms to hire and maintain squadrons of lawyers;

• law firms with technology-supercharged productivity will abandon their traditional role as the career launch pad for new graduates and become smaller in terms of the number of lawyers but larger in terms of reach and profitability;

• the legal profession will experience a competence and employment crisis, as wave after wave of new lawyers enter the sector insufficiently skilled to gainfully provide legal services to the revamped market; and

• lawyers in all types of legal businesses will level up their services to focus on personalized, relationship-based, high-value, and strategic advisory and advocacy work for their clients, as the machines move in to do most everything else.

This won’t happen next year, but I do think it will happen within ten. Throughout the course of the coming decade, not just the business model of law firms is going to change, but also the economic model and value offering of individual lawyers. What we do every day — what people and businesses pay us for — will shift from mostly transactional, procedural, informational, and documentary activities to more strategic, advisory, and consultative services. We will reduce our clients’ risks, help them grasp opportunities, and make their lives and businesses stronger and more resilient through our legally honed expertise and assistance.

I’ve written about the implications of this development for law schools, regulators, and law firms. But I haven’t given as much time to the impact on individual lawyers, especially younger ones, who of course are greatly concerned about what kind of future awaits them in this scenario. I think that future looks like a lot like the businesses run by my friends in the physiotherapy and kinesiology fields. And I think that’s going to be great.

Picture a lawyer — but not the kind of picture you’re accustomed to, someone in an office, wearing a suit, walking into court, sitting in a boardroom, etc. Those are just the trappings of a lawyer, the stock images of the profession, the costumes and the set design for the part we’ve always played. That picture doesn’t tell you who the lawyer is, or what they do, or who they do it for. And it applies to fewer and fewer lawyers all the time.

Think of a new picture. A lawyer dressed in Professional Casual, or Business Comfortable, an outfit that looks sharp but feels relaxed. A lawyer inside their own apartment, in an extra bedroom, or in a shared workspace on a nearby bus route, taking an Uber to visit some clients and using Zoom to meet with others. A lawyer with a laptop and a tablet and a smartphone and no other capital expenditures. A lawyer whose overhead is only what’s literally over their head.

This lawyer starts work when they feel like it (maybe 7 am, maybe 10; maybe Monday, maybe not) and they stop working when they feel like it (maybe 4 pm, maybe 9). They have as many clients as they need, for whom they provide very specific, very personalized services. They provide some services that aren’t even “legal” to people who aren’t “clients” as we understand both terms. They have essential knowledge and skills that all lawyers share but unique knowledge and skills that hardly any others possess. They make as much money as they need in order to meet the rent and pay down their debts and afford a life with the people they love. They’re in complete charge of their career and their destiny, something they find terrifying and stressful and wonderful and fulfilling.

I don’t know what that kind of lawyer life that sounds like to you. It might be entirely off-putting — unstructured, insecure, pressurized, isolated. But to many lawyers 35 and under — and probably to quite a few older ones — it will sound like a dream come true. Either way, that kind of career is going to proliferate throughout the legal profession over the next ten years.

You can trace the origins of this career back to solos and general practitioners, lawyers who ran their own businesses and helped everyday people with legal needs, but whose practices often aged along with them. You can find elements of this career in the modern gig economy, flex lawyers who are permanent freelancers and constant side hustlers, but who often get worn down by the disempowerment and anxiety. You can see versions of this career in the fractional lawyer who works part-time for companies without in-house counsel, but whose ambit is often narrowed by specialization and undercut by the success of the very clients they help to grow.

The kind of lawyer I have in mind resembles each of these models in some respects, but it feels incomplete to call them “fractional” or “flexible” or “solos,” or to consign them to the permanently uncertain and fundamentally exploitative gig economy. These lawyers have agency. They are deliberate. They know who they are and who they aren’t, what they’re doing and what they don’t want to do. They’ve found a particular space they know they can fill, and they’ve tailored their talents and skills and their time to fill it. I’d call them Niche Lawyers. I think they’re the future.

Across every sector and skill profile, freelancers, contractors and gig workers are forecast to constitute 80% of the global workforce by 2030. But even beyond these trends, it’s Generative AI that will make the Niche Lawyer career both necessary and possible.

• Necessary, because AI will compress and accelerate and take over so many everyday legal tasks that law firms will neither need nor want so many associates to carry out billable work — they will need only enough lawyers to intensively train in the business of serving institutional clients and someday become equity owners of the firm.

• Possible, because that same AI will power the independent careers of all those lawyers who once would’ve toiled for years in firms’ billable-hour mines, but who can now leverage the astonishing power of this technology to accomplish transactional, procedural, informational and documentational tasks in seconds, liberating those lawyers.

Liberated to do what? To focus their time and efforts not on files and forms and factums, but on repeatedly connecting with carefully selected clients and continuously giving them guidance in customized areas and constantly deepening their knowledge of what their clients need and how to help them get it. It’s the kind of work I spoke about in a recent speech to law students — to answer people’s questions like:

“What do you think I should do?” “What does the best course of action seem like?” “Will you help me navigate that course?” “Will you speak to others for me?” “Will you deal with others on my behalf?” “Will you accompany me on my journey?” People will come to you for everything they can’t get from the machine. They will ask for your insight, counsel, and honesty. They will seek out your wisdom, consolation, and integrity. Your fulfilment as a lawyer will arise from your trusted relationships with people by which you guide, advise, and support them.

My relationships with my health professionals are successful precisely because they know me. They understand my goals and my limitations, my strengths and my weaknesses, and they knew the right questions to ask and they knew how to listen to my answers and made an effort to connect with me as a person. Doctors like to say: “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient.” The great lawyer treats the client (the person, the family, the business), because the lawyer knows there is no other client like them — and by corollary, no other lawyer who can serve them so well.

This kind of lawyer, and this model of lawyer business, go together. If you develop deep, trusting, multi-faceted relationships with your clients, you simply can’t have 100 or 500 of them — your client list will necessarily be exclusive. And that will dovetail nicely with your desire (as befits today’s rising generations) to be intentional and aware with your time, to give as much of yourself to your work as you wish and no more — to make a life for yourself that includes your work as a lawyer, but isn’t consumed by it.

A Niche Lawyer career does include one non-negotiable element: continuous, specialized, self-guided learning and training. Remember, in the legal world of the near future, no one will equip you with the skills you need. Law schools and bar admission authorities should, but they never have before and they’re sure not going to start now. Law firms used to, but they’ll be hiring a fraction of the lawyers they once did and reserving their expensive training for the ones who’ll lead the business someday. This task is yours alone. If you don’t do it, you won’t have a legal career.

But if you do commit to continuously building your own personal speciality, your own blend of tailored legal expertise and unique personal profile day after day, you can be a Niche Lawyer — someone whose deliverables are important enough to a very particular type of clientele that you can dictate, or at least strongly influence, the terms of your legal livelihood. You’ll need to choose your track early, to be ruthlessly frugal and tech-streamlined in your work, and to invest serious time and energy into building your network and forming relationships. But because relationships will be what you’re really selling, that investment will be worth it.

That’s my vision, as best as I can make it out right now, for the lawyer of the future. There’s no one word or adjective that describes this type of lawyer — flexible, fractional, specialized, customized, precision, bespoke, curated, remote, part-time, full-throttle, I could keep going. But what it all comes down to, in my mind, is that you find your own place in the legal world — the Niche that only you can fill so well, helping the people and the businesses that no one else gets the way you do.

You don’t have to wait for AI to transform the legal profession in order to start becoming a Niche Lawyer. But I sure wouldn’t wait a day longer than that.