Does AI Really ‘Let You Do More Valuable Work’?

You’ve heard it many times: ‘AI will let lawyers do more valuable work.’ But will it really? The short answer is: ‘It depends’. The more detailed answer is as follows.

Can You Do More Complex Work?

A student lawyer on a summer scheme at a large law firm finds that AI can now do many of the tasks the supervising partner has given them. In fact, from their perspective – having used AI tools since late 2022 – the tasks they have been told to do during this educational stint are not much more than basic ‘secretarial’ tasks and incredibly easy to zip through with an LLM.

What happens next? Does the partner hand the summer associate a bunch of much more complex tasks, given that this person has never done any ‘real legal work’ yet? Nor has really had proper commercial law training, albeit has a good grasp of ‘The Law’ from studies at school.

It’s tricky. In good faith the student would have to say they didn’t really know what they were doing beyond a basic level of legal complexity. The partner would agree. What’s missing is training. Does the firm want to provide that training on this summer scheme to advance them to a much higher level, much faster? Perhaps. But, the challenge remains: some basic tasks have become redundant and ‘the next level’ of work cannot be offered without proper training.

Do Business Owners Want You To Do It?

Let’s say you are a very quick learner and in fact a bit of a genius. You grasp what this ‘next level’ is all about and feel good about doing it. The partner – a bit surprised – agrees you probably can do it. But…..does the firm want you getting into work that is already ‘spoken for’ by the regular associate body?

Does adding you into the midst of a deal team create new organisational problems? Perhaps billing issues and time-based accrual tensions with the other junior lawyers on the team? Is sufficient human capability already applied to this work and to add you means removing someone else from the team?

Is There More Complex Work To Do?

Or, perhaps it’s a very small law firm and it’s very partner-heavy. Once the basic work is done mostly by AI the partners don’t really have anything significant to give you, at least not that would be called ‘legal work’.

The basic tasks that are available are now handled 80% by AI. The permanent associate staff that work on such tasks now have a higher volume of matters because of the efficiency of AI – but, importantly – the quality, complexity, and strategic nature of this work is not higher. There is just more of it.

And in this small firm they don’t need more people to take up the slack, as there is no slack to be taken….even if AI has created the chance to handle more volume.

Or to use a more prosaic image, take a pizza place in central London. It’s one of those tourist spots that serves cheesy slices. It’s cheap, but fast and convenient. The owner buys one of these new-fangled pizza robots, which can make basic pizza slices at an incredible speed.

There are some upfront costs that the owner will need to work off, but whereas before they needed three staff to make the pizza bases, prepare toppings, and serve the customers, they now just need one member of staff.

The other two members of staff ask the owner if they can do something else. Can they add value elsewhere? The boss says: ‘This is what I do. I sell pizza slices. That’s it. There is nothing else to add here.’

One of the team members suggests a range of additional things the shop could offer, and ways to make the slices much better. But the boss doesn’t want to know. He has his business model, knows how it works, and doesn’t want to change.

At this point the two staff who are redundant have an incredible opportunity: they know something of the pizza slice world, they have seen how the robot works, they also know the local market. If they can get some capital together they can launch their own business – and perhaps bring to life their new ideas on how to improve things.

And this is the fundamental challenge not just lawyers will face: work replacement opens the opportunity for work augmentation, but will people seize the opportunity, especially when their employer is not offering anything new for them to do, and where that opportunity may involve starting their own business?

Going back to the legal world, one could argue that having more time to improve on the legal equivalent of a ‘pizza slice’ is always a good thing. But is it?

You might say: ‘But clients will always want more input, more insights, so if we have freed up our time with AI, we can create new value for them.’ But, is that true?

Not all legal tasks need to be endlessly complex, or the place where great new value is created. An NDA review, once mastered with a combination of AI and standard playbooks, doesn’t always need to become any more complex. Throwing the best legal minds in the firm at this review task doesn’t really increase its value to the client that much.

In short, if the goal is to sell ‘pizza slices’ and the business model, or at least that level of the business, is designed for that task, then very little of your opportunity for improvement is going to matter.

At the other end of the spectrum, e.g. high-level advice on a billion dollar deal, then yes, the world’s your oyster. But then, how many people in the firm are giving that level of advice?

Do You Want To Do More Complex Work?

I was giving a talk in Scandinavia last year about how AI will allow lawyers to focus on more complex work and after the speech an inhouse lawyer approached and said: ‘But, I like what I do, I don’t want to do more complex work.’

That stunned me – for a moment – but then it sunk in: I had been basing my view on the assumption that people always want to do more complex and ‘interesting’ work. The reality is that not everyone feels that way.

This group, in the legal world or elsewhere in the economy, are especially at risk, as if AI absorbs the tasks they do, but they don’t want to do more ‘human’ tasks, then what is left for them to do?

Conclusion

In short, yes, AI can allow lawyers to do more complex work. But, enabling that to happen and it actually happening are not guaranteed to follow through.

Much will depend on the tasks needed in that business model to create the level of value expected by the customers – whether internal clients or external.

The opportunity to do more complex things doesn’t operate in a vacuum.

For some, the best route will be to create their own new business that allows them to deliver the value they want to provide.

—

Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer