AI is quietly redrawing the legal industry
By Asım Serdar Yılmaz · Published · Last updated · 2 min read
Legal work sits near the top of most AI exposure charts. In The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth, published on 26 March 2023, the Goldman Sachs economists Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani put US legal work at 44 percent exposure to AI-driven automation, second only to administrative occupations at 46 percent, which is a measure of how much of the work is open to automation rather than how much has actually been automated. Three years on, that estimate reads less like a provocation and more like a project plan.
Adoption has since caught up with the forecast. Thomson Reuters reports generative AI use at 41 percent of law firms and 47 percent of corporate legal departments, with firms up from 28 percent, an increase of about half, and corporate departments up from 23 percent, roughly a doubling. The report frames this as adoption reaching critical mass rather than early experimentation. The plainer way to say it is that in a single budget cycle these tools moved from pilot to plumbing.
The change is to the lawyer’s surroundings more than to the lawyer. Research and first drafts can come down from days to hours, knowledge that used to sit in somebody’s inbox becomes retrievable, and models that lean on many juniors billing many hours start to feel the pressure. What separates one practice from another moves away from headcount and towards judgment, and towards the quality of the workflows and guardrails built around the tools. The need for a lawyer doesn’t go away; where that lawyer’s time is worth spending does.
The organisations pulling ahead are treating this as an operations question, which in practice means pilots, measurement and governance. The ones falling behind are treating it as procurement, and as far as I can tell that one choice explains most of the gap between them. Buying the technology was never the hard part; redesigning the work around it is, and that is where I would put the effort.