Lawyering in the age of AI

I recently received the following message from a client: “Please use AI as much as possible to reduce expenses!” Putting aside the perceived and real risks of delegating our jobs to AI, this unequivocal request reveals a clear expectation about the role of AI in the provision of legal services. 

This is an issue that deserves serious strategic consideration by the leadership of law firms, but there is another dimension to this that affects every lawyer directly, in particular, those seeking to enter the legal profession or currently in the early stages of their career. 

How can we ensure that our expertise – something that takes significant effort to acquire and develop – will continue to be valued and sought after? In a nutshell, how can we remain relevant in the age of AI?

Never stop seeking knowledge and learning

Although it is still early days to accurately predict the real impact that AI will have on our profession, we can already see that AI will replace many tasks and transform many skills. However, there is something that is very likely to remain forever necessary: having a fundamental and solid understanding of the area of law in which you practice and how it changes and adapts. In other words, knowing how to interpret and apply the law for the benefit of those we are acting for will always be a prerequisite for providing a valuable service. In fact, as AI tools become more capable at retrieving and summarising the law, knowing which interpretation is right, which argument will be genuinely persuasive, and when an authoritative-looking analysis is actually wrong will be critical. There may be tools that we can use to learn faster and communicate more effectively, but ultimately being a lawyer is a constant exercise of deploying technical and practical knowledge that provides reassurance and persuasion.

Cultivate your interpersonal skills

Knowledge aside, law is essentially about human relationships. How we deal with colleagues, clients, adversaries, policy makers, regulators and judges is a crucial part of how successful we are in our legal career. These are not just soft skills that sit alongside the law. Knowing how to be calmly reassuring to a client in a crisis, when an aggressive stance is and isn't appropriate, or how to read the mood of a regulator across the table is the kind of intrinsically human quality that lawyers must deploy and master. The exercise of the legal profession is a never-ending process of human interaction, and this is what gives us the edge. Those who are naturally good at interpersonal skills have an advantage, but everything can be learnt and practised, so any time spent at cultivating those skills will be a wise and long-lasting investment.

Be part of the AI revolution

In any societal revolution, those who are able to embrace the positive aspects brought by change tend to benefit from it. The message here is simple: don’t look at AI as a threat because you will miss the opportunities that it will certainly create. AI is already here playing an active role in the enhancement of knowledge and delivery of services, so see it as technology that can be helpful in your job. But in order to benefit from AI technology, we must appreciate that new skills will need to be learnt, including understanding AI’s limitations and indeed its risks. If we are to truly benefit from AI, lawyers need to be players in this game, not spectators.