Building the lawyer of the future

We're running out of time to identify the functions and design the competencies of the post-AI legal profession. Here's my latest "Future Lawyer Starter Kit." Tell me what you think.

Before the end of this year, I’ll be announcing a pretty exciting project that involves the future of lawyers and the legal sector. As part of the groundwork for that project, I’m once again revising my assessment of:

1. What activities lawyers will perform in the future legal market, and

2. Which competencies they should possess at the point of licensure.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ll know that these two questions have basically become my life’s work. I’ve been trying to answer them for years now, on many occasions from 2012 to 2021 at my Law21 blog and several more times here at Substack.

In 2020 and 2022, I wrote reports for the regulators of legal services in Alberta and British Columbia that more fully explored lawyer competence; in the BC report, I suggested a “Starter Kit” of 34 areas of knowledge and skill that could constitute entry-point lawyer competence. (I’m very pleased that that report led to the development and adoption of the Western Canada Competency Profile earlier this year.) I felt like I was getting a handle on this subject.

But then, in March 2023, ChatGPT-4 was released, and although few lawyers were aware of it at the time, the legal world changed. I remember thinking that, had Generative AI’s advances occurred before I submitted my report to the BC Law Society, I would have made different recommendations. Certainly I wouldn’t have suggested “drafting documents” and “doing legal research” as core competencies of future lawyers.

Since that time, I’ve gradually had to come to grips with the prospect that many of the tasks lawyers are trained and hired to do today will be automated. That’s led me to ask uncomfortable questions like: In the post-AI legal world, what will lawyers do? Can we really all become trusted counsel? Preventive lawyers? Advocates and advisors? Overseers of the machine?

And if we can answer those questions affirmatively, what will constitute the competence necessary for lawyers to fill these roles and provide these services? Human skills will matter more than they ever did, even more than technical abilities. But I am deeply alarmed that neither law schools nor bar admission entities nor legal regulators understand that by staying the course as they are, they will oversee the licensure of cohort after cohort of increasingly unemployable lawyers.

It seems to me that’s where things stand, here at the end of a turbulent 2024 that will precede a chaotic and very dangerous 2025. That chaos in particular is why I consider this to be such important work. We can’t afford to just let the market take its course and “replace lawyers with AI,” or whatever other fate will befall the profession if it continues sleepwalking towards the cliff. Lawyers matter to society, whether we want that responsibility or not. And society is really, really going to need us at our best these next four years.

So that’s why I keep trying to solve the puzzle of lawyers’ future activities and their corresponding required competence. I’ve tried many solutions over the past five years, but none has been correct, or at least correct enough for my satisfaction. This article is my latest attempt to land a little closer to the bullseye. Here we go.

1. Lawyers’ Future Activities. If you believe, as I do, that Gen AI and other technology will take over most of the tasks that occupy lawyers’ time today (including drafting, reviewing, researching, transacting, negotiating, even recommending courses of action), then you’ll find yourself trying to figure out: Okay, then what will lawyers do? What will people need, when it comes to their legal rights and options, that they won’t be able to get from a machine?

We are not going to look through the “lawyer lens” on this one. We have to answer those questions from the perspective of the people (and businesses) with law-related problems and opportunities — from the demand side, not the supply side. And legal demand, I’ve concluded, essentially comes down to a person or business saying to themselves, “I need someone to help me deal with this.”

I’m a strong proponent of “legal empowerment,” giving people the capacity to identify their legal needs and go as far as they can towards fulfilling those needs by themselves. Generative AI should be an incredibly powerful weapon in that battle, bringing untold numbers of people out of the “shadow legal market” and into the light of effective legal access.

But I don’t foresee technology serving every possible law-related need, or replacing the highest-impact services lawyers already provide. People will still need some help when it comes to the law. If you’re an individual, that includes help in dealing with:

1. The government, to get services and benefits to which you’re entitled by law;

2. Other people, to assert rights, resolve conflicts, and manage ongoing relationships;

3. Life, to get compensation for loss and security for your assets, family, and future.

If you’re a business, that includes help in dealing with:

1. The government, to pay tax, comply with regulations, thwart unjust interference;

2. Other businesses, to transact with, compete against, fight in court, or acquire;

3. Business life, to manage employees, minimize risks, and seize opportunities.

Obviously, these categories aren’t exhaustive; you could add a hundred examples to each. The point is that every day, people and businesses face challenges and opportunities that they lack either the wherewithal or the bandwidth (or both) to solve themselves. Either the problem (or the opportunity) is too complicated, or it’s too important, or it’s too difficult to take on alone. They need help — trustworthy, reliable, expert help — to get from bad “Point A” to good “Point B.”

Because almost all these challenges touch on the law in some way, the expertise they require will be legal in some fashion. But my belief is that the legal angle is sufficient, but not necessary, for a lawyer to be involved. A good lawyer can give trusted counsel or steadfast support that does not touch in any way upon the law. The “legal part” of the challenge is the lawyer’s opening to start a relationship and provide a service. It need not be everything, or even anything, that comes after.

Accordingly, I think we can group lawyers’ future activities into four broad categories, regardless of whether the lawyer is serving individuals, businesses, or other types of entities:

1. Advice: Giving good counsel, offering guidance, providing wise judgment;

2. Advocacy: Asserting rights, obtaining entitlements, achieving compensation;

3. Solutions: Fixing problems, resolving conflicts, avoiding future troubles; and

4. Strategy: Creating opportunities, multiplying options, planning for the future.

These are high-value, highly sophisticated services that a trustworthy human expert can provide to another human or to a business owned and operated by humans. We are outside the realm of information and documents here, because that realm is going to become assimilated by technology. We’ve moved into the realm of the personal — which is where lawyers should always have been headquartered anyway.

2. Lawyers’ Future Competencies: Proceeding on the assumption that the foregoing are the kinds of activities lawyers will be called on to perform in future, we will need to “reverse-engineer” those roles to determine the qualities necessary for their performance.

Lawyers’ core focus will always be the law, and so lawyer formation will still require a foundational grounding in:

1. Essential legal knowledge,

2. Critical legal theory and jurisprudence, and

3. Core legal reasoning and analytical skills (i.e., “thinking like a lawyer”).

We can have a fascinating discussion, down the road, about exactly what should fall within each of those categories. I don’t have the space to explore that here, although I’d recommend being flexible about what’s added to and subtracted from the canon over the course of time — especially the subtraction, so that future lawyers don’t have to still learn real estate if they don’t want to.

Building upon this knowledge foundation, I suggest that future lawyers should develop the following ten human competencies (through a completely overhauled education, training, and licensing process, but that’s a topic for another day):

1. Acting ethically

2. Advocating and negotiating

3. Demonstrating character

4. Displaying empathy

5. Exercising judgment

6. Giving advice

7. Reasoning legally

8. Relating with people

9. Resolving conflicts

10. Solving problems

These ten competencies are not delivered to you on two stone tablets. I haven’t even settled on whether this list is fully accurate or comprehensive. It might well be that only some of these can be established at the start of a lawyer’s career, while others (including character and judgment) will take longer to develop.

But at the moment, all ten of these competencies feel essential to a lawyer’s ultimate capacity to effectively perform the four types of activities identified earlier. If you want to offer advice, advocacy, solutions, and strategy in the legal space in a professional, trustworthy manner, I don’t see how any of these ten competencies can be considered ancillary. And I think we need to start developing them, inculcating them, and assessing whether lawyers have achieved them, as soon as we possibly can.

And this is where you come in. What do you make of these suggested lawyer activities and competencies in the post-AI, post-Boomer, post-stability world? Are any of them unnecessary? Have I overlooked something essential? As I said at the outset, I’ve been taking aim at these issues over and over again for years now, hoping to get a little closer to the target each time. I feel like this version is an improvement. But I would really benefit from your feedback, now and into next year.

And we don’t have a lot of time to figure all this out. AI is catching up with lawyer competence at breakneck speed, and the day is drawing near when it pulls even and then accelerates past us. I want to believe that lawyers will still be necessary and valuable in the troubling new world that’s coming our way. Help me figure out how.