Generative AI will take over legal task performance and catalyze an identity crisis for the legal profession — unless lawyers instead turn this into an opportunity to redefine their purpose and value.
This is an important framing. The real shift is from precedent-driven to foresight-driven. Prestige has long given lawyers a borrowed identity, but AI is breaking that link. The real opportunity now is for lawyers to create identity through foresight, judgment, and trust and not just follow the signals of prestige.
Thank you for pushing us to find our purpose and to intentionally train for it and build our systems to support it. Where I sit causes me to ask: What qualities, capacities, and experiences should our law schools look for in candidates to our reformed profession? What competences and knowledge should our law schools be focused on? How should we decide what law graduates are prepared to enter a profession where building fiduciary relationships, imagining systems to facilitate the acquisition of client goals and realization of client's rights, and exercising judgement are the coin of the realm?
Hi Jordan, I’d really love to hear more of your thinking on this — it’s core to the work I do and something I’m deeply passionate about. Thanks for prompting such a great discussion, Mary Lu!
Thanks, Kylie! The short answer is that I've got a major writing project underway that I'll be posting about in more detail in a month or so, and much of it is devoted to the questions Mary Lu raises: Which extra-legal qualities will lawyers need in future, and how do we inculcate them during the lawyer formation process?
I've made a few feints in this direction, notably:
But I'm not fully satisfied with any of them -- my Grand Unified Theory of how to approach this enormous challenge isn't fully formed. To the extent I've come to any firm conclusions, they include:
- Law schools have no guaranteed role in a new lawyer formation process, and most probably won't be able to adapt to what the new system demands.
- Legal knowledge and reasoning must continue to be the core of lawyer competence -- otherwise, we're just glorified strategic consultants.
- Personal character and ethical behaviour are the other cornerstones of lawyering, and they need to be massively ramped up in lawyer formation.
- Supervised experiential learning is absolutely critical to lawyer development, and it needs to be embedded in the pre- and post-licensure stages.
I maintain a view of lawyers that will strike many people inside and outside the profession as unbearably naive: Lawyers are supposed to be a positive force in society. We're supposed to help and, where possible, to do good; at a minimum, we should copy the doctors and first do no harm. But when you raise lawyers to be shrewd manipulators and zealous advocates -- which is what we've been doing for the last century -- you won't accomplish those goals. So I think we should stop doing that.
Hoping to make the long-delayed announcement in October -- fingers crossed.
I think these words needed to be said. I love your perspective, Jordan, because this is the window of action when transitions and evolution and identity can happen.
Can you imagine that anything that even resembled a concierge doctor would have been possible years ago? Well, actually, it did exist in a land far far away many decades ago when there were house calls, but I am talking about the time frame in between then and now. I talk to more and more people on a monthly basis that say that they or their parents have moved to that model of healthcare because they want someone who is responsive and who is there when they need them.
This does take dreaming of a situation that would make a difference to a client, and that would be fulfilling to the attorney.
For too long lawyers have charged for the wrong thing. We’ve charged for the research, the drafting and revisions, and the document we hand the client or court. In other words, we’ve charged for our effort, the things we do and produce. Those are the things that hourly billing is great at tracking and has made many senior partners very wealthy. In exchange, however, we’ve given away for free the diagnosis, strategy, explanation, and customization of legal solutions to the client’s specific needs and situation.
But this is all backwards.
Because it is precisely those things that don’t show up on a bill that clients find most valuable. And is those things that, as you’ve pointed out, GenAI is least likely to take over. If you can find it on a timesheet, GenAI is probably going to handle it and do so faster. Lawyers are going to have to start putting more value on — by charging for — those things that clients find as most valuable. Or otherwise face the existential crisis that is coming for them.
Well said Brad! Customers want results not activity, outputs not input. The legal industry has simply and arrogantly disregarded the customer for far too long — now the race to irrelevance is truly on!
Jeffrey, At first I took a little offense at your categorizing lawyers as becoming irrelevant. After all, paper and envelopes still have a place despite the ubiquity of email. But the longer I sat with it, the more the idea of irrelevance has grown on me.
I do think that lawyers risk consumers of legal services no longer having lawyers top-of-mind when it comes to legal issues. It is already happening at the consumer/non-corporate level, where people turn to ChatGPT to draft up contracts without even considering whether they should talk to a lawyer to help.
For so long lawyers have neglected what clients actually want. We thought it was a solution to their legal problem — they have an issue, we fix it, just like a car mechanic. So we focused on getting good at fixing issues and turning that into profit, acting as if we were the only mechanic in town. But that isn’t all that clients want. Yes, they want their problem fixed. But the experience they have is often just as important. And we aren’t the only mechanic in town. They have options, and not all of them are lawyers. The longer lawyers keep treating clients as if it is privilege to do business with us, the more clients are going to start looking for those who it is a pleasure doing business with. And right now, ChatGPT and its friends are providing a much better experience than lawyers.
I haven’t given up hope that lawyer can maintain relevance. It is probably not going to be for low-value things like drafting basic contracts between two individuals — I think that ship has likely left the port, and we all know how difficult it is to turn around a huge vessel. Lawyers instead need to double down on those things that clients truly do care about: diagnosis, strategy, explanation, and customization — and make working with us something clients want to do rather than feel they are forced to do.
Brad — sorry, that was my short hand way to say if lawyers continue to work they way they have, they are making themselves largely irrelevant — for all the reasons you’ve articulated so well and Jordan lays out in his insightful column. I’m reminded of a favorite quote from US Army Chief of Staff, Gen Eric Shinseki, “if you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more”
I’ve argued for many years that lawyers should be process owners and designers, not process operators. Beyond ownership and design, the ONLY operator task for lawyers is for the very few steps in any process that actually require application of legal judgment. And let’s be clear, most of those steps simply don’t. But for all the reasons you identify in this fantastic article, the lawyer default is “it all requires the applicaiton of legal judgment and that’s my secret sauce, my raison d’être.” Now as the AI compiled and curated statistical analysis becomes more and more robust, the algorithm may resemble “judgment” when it’s really simply defining what most would do in this situation. The real secret sauce is where there is no right or predictable choice, but the left/right/stay/forward/retreat is truly judgment based on the context and the customer’s objective. The real challenge for the legal industry isn’t the identity crisis because ultimately, as in the case of the Borg, “resistance is futile, you will be assimilated” — or in this case traditional “I do the work because that’s what I do & who I am” lawyers will be disregarded/bypassed/rendered irrelevant. The real challenge is the business model reflecting the Delivered Value of the legal process stream to the customer.
The identity shift you describe feels inevitable. If task performance becomes infrastructure, then the differentiator for lawyers becomes judgment, trust, and relational influence. That’s both unsettling and liberating. The lawyers who invest early in developing strategic thinking, emotional steadiness, and commercial awareness will find themselves less threatened by AI and more amplified by it.
Thank you for writing about this! I have been learning about legal technology and have thought very deeply about the future role of the lawyer as AI gradually is applied to each workflow within the delivery of legal services. Somewhere in this equation is also the role legal tech will play in promoting more equitable access to legal services, especially for Pro-se litigants.
Thank you Jordan, and also to those who've left thoughtful comments below. "What do you want?" is a great question that lawyers are unaccustomed to asking themselves - a good beginning on a path of sometimes-uncomfortable discernment. Eventually, another question might emerge from that inquiry: What wants to emerge with our help? These two questions together call lawyers with a sense of vocation about law to grow into a new identity as the guardians of a just and merciful order: a kind of secular priest. This points toward a new trajectory for law and legal training: away from technical accomplishment and toward a thing we will define together, with the curated assistance of AI.
This is an important framing. The real shift is from precedent-driven to foresight-driven. Prestige has long given lawyers a borrowed identity, but AI is breaking that link. The real opportunity now is for lawyers to create identity through foresight, judgment, and trust and not just follow the signals of prestige.
Thank you for pushing us to find our purpose and to intentionally train for it and build our systems to support it. Where I sit causes me to ask: What qualities, capacities, and experiences should our law schools look for in candidates to our reformed profession? What competences and knowledge should our law schools be focused on? How should we decide what law graduates are prepared to enter a profession where building fiduciary relationships, imagining systems to facilitate the acquisition of client goals and realization of client's rights, and exercising judgement are the coin of the realm?
Mary Lu, if it helps, I’m working on something that will hopefully answer most of those questions. 🙂
Hi Jordan, I’d really love to hear more of your thinking on this — it’s core to the work I do and something I’m deeply passionate about. Thanks for prompting such a great discussion, Mary Lu!
Thanks, Kylie! The short answer is that I've got a major writing project underway that I'll be posting about in more detail in a month or so, and much of it is devoted to the questions Mary Lu raises: Which extra-legal qualities will lawyers need in future, and how do we inculcate them during the lawyer formation process?
I've made a few feints in this direction, notably:
- https://jordanfurlong.substack.com/p/building-the-lawyer-of-the-future
- https://jordanfurlong.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-rise-of-the-niche-lawyer
- https://jordanfurlong.substack.com/p/the-race-against-time-to-reinvent
But I'm not fully satisfied with any of them -- my Grand Unified Theory of how to approach this enormous challenge isn't fully formed. To the extent I've come to any firm conclusions, they include:
- Law schools have no guaranteed role in a new lawyer formation process, and most probably won't be able to adapt to what the new system demands.
- Legal knowledge and reasoning must continue to be the core of lawyer competence -- otherwise, we're just glorified strategic consultants.
- Personal character and ethical behaviour are the other cornerstones of lawyering, and they need to be massively ramped up in lawyer formation.
- Supervised experiential learning is absolutely critical to lawyer development, and it needs to be embedded in the pre- and post-licensure stages.
I maintain a view of lawyers that will strike many people inside and outside the profession as unbearably naive: Lawyers are supposed to be a positive force in society. We're supposed to help and, where possible, to do good; at a minimum, we should copy the doctors and first do no harm. But when you raise lawyers to be shrewd manipulators and zealous advocates -- which is what we've been doing for the last century -- you won't accomplish those goals. So I think we should stop doing that.
Hoping to make the long-delayed announcement in October -- fingers crossed.
I think these words needed to be said. I love your perspective, Jordan, because this is the window of action when transitions and evolution and identity can happen.
Can you imagine that anything that even resembled a concierge doctor would have been possible years ago? Well, actually, it did exist in a land far far away many decades ago when there were house calls, but I am talking about the time frame in between then and now. I talk to more and more people on a monthly basis that say that they or their parents have moved to that model of healthcare because they want someone who is responsive and who is there when they need them.
This does take dreaming of a situation that would make a difference to a client, and that would be fulfilling to the attorney.
For too long lawyers have charged for the wrong thing. We’ve charged for the research, the drafting and revisions, and the document we hand the client or court. In other words, we’ve charged for our effort, the things we do and produce. Those are the things that hourly billing is great at tracking and has made many senior partners very wealthy. In exchange, however, we’ve given away for free the diagnosis, strategy, explanation, and customization of legal solutions to the client’s specific needs and situation.
But this is all backwards.
Because it is precisely those things that don’t show up on a bill that clients find most valuable. And is those things that, as you’ve pointed out, GenAI is least likely to take over. If you can find it on a timesheet, GenAI is probably going to handle it and do so faster. Lawyers are going to have to start putting more value on — by charging for — those things that clients find as most valuable. Or otherwise face the existential crisis that is coming for them.
Well said Brad! Customers want results not activity, outputs not input. The legal industry has simply and arrogantly disregarded the customer for far too long — now the race to irrelevance is truly on!
Jeffrey, At first I took a little offense at your categorizing lawyers as becoming irrelevant. After all, paper and envelopes still have a place despite the ubiquity of email. But the longer I sat with it, the more the idea of irrelevance has grown on me.
I do think that lawyers risk consumers of legal services no longer having lawyers top-of-mind when it comes to legal issues. It is already happening at the consumer/non-corporate level, where people turn to ChatGPT to draft up contracts without even considering whether they should talk to a lawyer to help.
For so long lawyers have neglected what clients actually want. We thought it was a solution to their legal problem — they have an issue, we fix it, just like a car mechanic. So we focused on getting good at fixing issues and turning that into profit, acting as if we were the only mechanic in town. But that isn’t all that clients want. Yes, they want their problem fixed. But the experience they have is often just as important. And we aren’t the only mechanic in town. They have options, and not all of them are lawyers. The longer lawyers keep treating clients as if it is privilege to do business with us, the more clients are going to start looking for those who it is a pleasure doing business with. And right now, ChatGPT and its friends are providing a much better experience than lawyers.
I haven’t given up hope that lawyer can maintain relevance. It is probably not going to be for low-value things like drafting basic contracts between two individuals — I think that ship has likely left the port, and we all know how difficult it is to turn around a huge vessel. Lawyers instead need to double down on those things that clients truly do care about: diagnosis, strategy, explanation, and customization — and make working with us something clients want to do rather than feel they are forced to do.
Brad — sorry, that was my short hand way to say if lawyers continue to work they way they have, they are making themselves largely irrelevant — for all the reasons you’ve articulated so well and Jordan lays out in his insightful column. I’m reminded of a favorite quote from US Army Chief of Staff, Gen Eric Shinseki, “if you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more”
Very insightful. Thanks for the wake up call .
Ever insightful, ever sensible, always interesting. Thank you, Jordan.
I’ve argued for many years that lawyers should be process owners and designers, not process operators. Beyond ownership and design, the ONLY operator task for lawyers is for the very few steps in any process that actually require application of legal judgment. And let’s be clear, most of those steps simply don’t. But for all the reasons you identify in this fantastic article, the lawyer default is “it all requires the applicaiton of legal judgment and that’s my secret sauce, my raison d’être.” Now as the AI compiled and curated statistical analysis becomes more and more robust, the algorithm may resemble “judgment” when it’s really simply defining what most would do in this situation. The real secret sauce is where there is no right or predictable choice, but the left/right/stay/forward/retreat is truly judgment based on the context and the customer’s objective. The real challenge for the legal industry isn’t the identity crisis because ultimately, as in the case of the Borg, “resistance is futile, you will be assimilated” — or in this case traditional “I do the work because that’s what I do & who I am” lawyers will be disregarded/bypassed/rendered irrelevant. The real challenge is the business model reflecting the Delivered Value of the legal process stream to the customer.
The identity shift you describe feels inevitable. If task performance becomes infrastructure, then the differentiator for lawyers becomes judgment, trust, and relational influence. That’s both unsettling and liberating. The lawyers who invest early in developing strategic thinking, emotional steadiness, and commercial awareness will find themselves less threatened by AI and more amplified by it.
Thank you for writing about this! I have been learning about legal technology and have thought very deeply about the future role of the lawyer as AI gradually is applied to each workflow within the delivery of legal services. Somewhere in this equation is also the role legal tech will play in promoting more equitable access to legal services, especially for Pro-se litigants.
Lawyers aren’t task-doers anymore. AI owns that. The ones who survive will be architects of legal infrastructure, or they won’t be lawyers at all.
Thank you Jordan, and also to those who've left thoughtful comments below. "What do you want?" is a great question that lawyers are unaccustomed to asking themselves - a good beginning on a path of sometimes-uncomfortable discernment. Eventually, another question might emerge from that inquiry: What wants to emerge with our help? These two questions together call lawyers with a sense of vocation about law to grow into a new identity as the guardians of a just and merciful order: a kind of secular priest. This points toward a new trajectory for law and legal training: away from technical accomplishment and toward a thing we will define together, with the curated assistance of AI.