When I was 12 years old, I walked into the district attorney’s office of my Kansas hometown and asked for a job. I was inspired by onscreen lawyers depicted as hardworking professionals fighting for the rights of others or strategizing the best way to pull off a multibillion transaction. Despite the advice of everyone in the profession, I spent my entire adolescence and young adulthood preparing to become a lawyer.
I was ecstatic when I was accepted and then graduated from Harvard Law School. I had spent more than a decade envisioning all that I’d do with my law degree.
My first task at a law firm was to manually ensure signature lines were the same length across 18 different documents set. The firm billed the client over $600 an hour for me to use all of my schooling and education to accomplish this task.
It’s been commonly accepted that American corporations and individuals pay for young associates with prestigious credentials an alarmingly high billable hour to complete non-legal tasks. That is no longer the case.
The legal profession I entered upon graduation is already dramatically different. Whether the industry likes it or not, the introduction of artificial intelligence is reshaping the distribution of talent and availability of resources, which I ultimately think will be beneficial to lawyers and clients alike.
The use of AI in white-collar professions is still in its infancy. Lawyers complain about hallucinations, mistakes, and the technology’s other shortcomings. But despite its imperfections, AI is already transforming the way that most people practice law.
Harvey and Legora first entered the scene less than five years ago and have catalyzed the change. The two dominate the BigLaw AI scene, acting more like tech companies than law companies as they sponsor sports leagues, plaster celebrity spokespeople on billboards, and hold multibillion valuations ($15 and $5.6 billion, respectively).
It used to be a running joke that selling legal tech was near-impossible because law partners have no incentive to maximize efficiency and no desire to re-learn their expensive, prestigious skillsets. Now, legal tech is the hottest thing in Silicon Valley. BigLaw firms are spending to hire top-name engineers and transforming themselves into tech companies behind the scenes. The convergence of law and the tech world was unimaginable when I was in law school.
As law firms are forced to adjust their models, their leaders are also reconsidering their place in the industry. Lawyers are realizing they no longer need a big firm’s infrastructure or training model, and star players are walking out of top firms and taking their books of business with them. Chris Kercher leaving Quinn Emanuel to launch a small, tech-driven firm isn’t an outlier. He’s just early.
Technology will transform the legal industry much how the internet transformed search. A decade from now, many BigLaw firms will be skeletons of themselves. Along the way, access to high-quality legal will expand dramatically. As AI allows for the proliferation of knowledge and access to resources, this will democratize access to high quality legal and flatten the influence of major law firms—and the inherent advantage held by the small number of clients currently able to afford their services.
Lawyers also have enormous upside. Whereas they have historically been funneled into hierarchical law firms to spend a couple years billing time around the clock for no profit share, there are already countless more ways for young attorneys to leverage their degrees and skills.
It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a lawyer. We are practicing in an era of transformation, as a previously guarded industry is opening up to the masses in real time. At the AI-powered law firm that I run, we see hundreds of applications every day from the brightest students wanting to take part in that shift.
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