Stewardship and the post-AI legal profession

Gen AI is climbing the "legal skills ladder" with alarming speed. What if lawyers responded with comprehensive “legal-plus” oversight of their clients’ affairs? Welcome to Peace Of Mind As A Service.

Here are three news items about unnerving recent developments in Generative AI, one insightful observation (from someone else) about Gen AI in the law, and a novel suggestion (from me) for a different approach to lawyering that could open up new pathways for the post-AI profession.

1. A Harvard Business Review study made the startling finding that the top three ways people are using Gen AI in 2025 are for therapy/companionship, organizing their daily activities, and finding some purpose in their lives. Items #2 and #3 on the list didn’t even crack the top 100 in a similar study last year. People are turning to Generative AI primarily because they’re feeling lonely, overwhelmed, or lost. This is bad news if, like me, you believe human relationships are at the heart of our existence on this Earth; it’s particularly bad news if you’re a professional therapist or might like to be one someday.

2. Two studies from the MIT Sloan School of Management concluded that ChatGPT-4 (which has already been surpassed by more advanced models) was extraordinarily effective at breaking people’s beliefs in conspiracy theories, and even at making the dissuaded ex-believer more likely to challenge other conspiracists. The AI programs accomplished this by supplying targeted, evidence-based counterarguments tailored to address the specific reasons people held their beliefs.

3. An ethically dubious experiment from the University of Zurich surreptitiously planted LLM bots on the popular debate subreddit r/changemyview, posing as humans with fabricated personalities and back stories, and sometimes forming arguments tailored to each user based on their backgrounds and previous activity. The persuasive ability of the customized bots in particular “ranked in the 99th percentile among all users and the 98th percentile among [the best debaters on the subreddit], critically approaching thresholds that experts associate with the emergence of existential AI risks.”

Just two years ago, I wrote that although Generative AI would very likely develop the technical skills that enable much lawyer work, lawyers could simply level up to focus on work that required more valuable human skills like empathy, persuasion, and interpersonal relations.

I believed at the time that (a) Gen AI was still some distance away from mimicking deeply human traits, and (b) most people would prefer to get their humanity from other humans rather than from a machine. After reading these articles, I’m not as confident in those beliefs anymore.

Lawyers’ usual response to this kind of observation is that no jury is going to be persuaded by an AI and no judge will ever permit the possibility. I think that’s correct. But courtroom litigation is only one sphere in which lawyers practise persuasion, and far from the most common: Countless negotiations or attempts to settle a dispute occur in every lawyer’s practice, especially at the individual level. And if people are using AI to share their personal problems and seek comfort and advice, well, that’s at least partly in our bailiwick, too.

I’m not predicting, at all, that lawyers will lose our livelihoods to AI. But I want to make the point that all the “uniquely human skills” we’ve considered our defence against AI might not be the impassable firewall we once imagined. We’ve never seen anything like Generative AI before. We’re up against something that’s still evolving in ways no previous technology ever has.

This is a point well made by Jae Um in a recent article about AI’s potential to fundamentally disrupt the legal industry. Her audience is AmLaw 100 firms, but her observations about AI’s capacity to perform creative and strategic work are broadly applicable:

AI is the first emergent tech capability that does not start with the simplest tasks. Its capabilities follow a jagged frontier, where rote tasks prove harder than complex ones demanding creativity and nuance. In fact, AI's creativity often confounds prescriptive, perfectly consistent outputs — and that's a feature, not a bug. … AI’s capabilities require a jarring reversal of familiar mantras that defined tech adoption in the past: “start with the mundane,” “allow lawyers to focus on more strategic work.” Successful AI legal innovation will leave behind the notion that simplicity begets scale.

Lawyers should no longer assume that any given skill we possess, including our “most human,” will remain permanently beyond Generative AI’s ability to mimic or replicate. And that’s on the basis of the AI we’ve seen so far — there’s reason to think the much-vaunted (and feared) Artificial General Intelligence might not just be around the corner, it might already be here. But even current AI has shown us enough to merit taking outlier possibilities seriously and thinking hard about lawyers’ future purpose. If AI keeps going like this, what will become of us as a profession?

Here’s how we might start answering that question: Stop focusing so much on ourselves.

I’m certainly guilty of this: The thesis of my 2023 post about technical vs. human skills was that lawyers should build up their irreplaceable human qualities in order to climb the competence ladder beyond AI’s reach. But as it turns out, AI can climb that ladder too, and it scales the rungs with astonishing speed.

So I’m coming to think a ladder is the wrong place for us altogether. We would do better to climb back down onto the ground, here in the real world where our clients are, and ask ourselves: “What exactly do they need us for?”

We have to answer that question in client terms, not lawyer terms. People don’t come to us because we have such fabulous skills, but because they have very particular needs for their very specific lives. Richard Susskind’s old analogy is on point here, the one about the power drill shopper whose goal is not to own a drill, but to have pretty songbirds gather in a backyard birdhouse that she built by herself. We have to keep remembering that it’s not about us. Focusing on other people’s needs and desires is essential.

I touched on this issue briefly in a post here last fall:

[E]very 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 too important, or too difficult to take on alone. They need trustworthy, reliable, expert help to get from bad “Point A” to good “Point B.” … Legal demand essentially comes down to a person or business saying to themselves, “I need someone to help me deal with this.”

People’s lives — and for present purposes, I’ll include businesses here — are messy and difficult. Every single day, people face complications, problems, restrictions, and obstacles that get in the way of what they really want to do. Or they have duties, responsibilities, distractions, and demands that take up their bandwidth and drain their mental and emotional reserves.

It’s a complex, challenging world out there, and we all turn to others (if we can) for help in making our way through it. So we ask caregivers to help us manage our home and family; coaches to help us manage our health and wellness; advisors to help us manage our money and time.

What we don’t usually have is anyone to help us deal with the ongoing complications, risks, troubles, and opportunities in our lives and businesses. We don’t have that trustworthy person to whom we can say, “Look after this for me, would you? Take care of this matter. Find this answer. Make this connection. Manage this risk. Solve this problem. Handle this dispute. Keep an eye on this opportunity. Take these worries off my hands.”

What if lawyers evolved to fill that role?

Almost a dozen years ago, I wrote that lawyers really sell their clients only one thing: Peace of mind. I believe that’s even more true today, and it contains what I think could be the key to lawyers’ post-AI future. Maybe AI can replicate lawyers’ skills. But it can’t take away our capacity to provide stewardship for our clients. That’s where I think lawyers could find new purpose and opportunity.

We could tell clients: “I can manage your life’s (or business’s) complexities, look after the details, take care of problems, and handle whatever comes up — legal and otherwise. What’s more, I can give you good advice, stand by you in troubles, and help you plan your future. I can provide trusted stewardship of all your valuable affairs — and I can do all this on a fixed monthly retainer or subscription basis.”

Consider how your professional focus would shift if you changed the description of your business from “Legal Services” to “Trusted Stewardship.” You’d be defining your offerings not in terms of “legal stuff I can do,” but in terms of “what people really need, legal and otherwise.” You’d be integrating all your valuable capabilities and competencies into a single unified offering of reliable oversight, problem solving, risk assessment, and issue management, customized to each client, beyond the realm of the merely legal. You could think of it as “Peace Of Mind As A Service” (POMAAS).

It will still matter how determined and intelligent and legally knowledgable you are; but it will matter even more how trustworthy and ethical and stalwart you are. You’ll provide reliable oversight of your client’s life or business affairs. All your capacities and all your resources — including AI, which you will make great use of — will be dedicated and directed to this stewardship role.

Could AI come for even this function someday? Sure, it's always possible. But look, if our society gets to the point where people truly prefer to get every single personal need and interpersonal connection from a machine rather than from other humans, then we’ll have bigger problems than finding something for lawyers to do. I really don't think it's likely; but I also don't think it's remotely worth worrying about.

I'm focused on one very specific question: “Given everything we know about what AI is likely to do to the legal sector, what — if anything — will the lawyer of the future be called upon to do?” Right now, I think the answer is that lawyers will transcend our traditional roles, break through our self-imposed barriers about what we do and don’t provide, and set our sights on a holistic, trustworthy, “legal-plus” stewardship role that oversees, safeguards, and improves our clients’ lives and businesses.

So let AI climb the legal skills ladder, all the way to the top if it likes. We’ll take that ladder and make it just one part of our bustling new construction site, where we’re building something original, valuable, and fulfilling for lawyers and clients alike.