Noah Coco '26
Managing Editor
As a law student, if you are not thinking about how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact your legal career, you should probably start. If you are already thinking about how AI will impact your career, you should be encouraged by the opportunities it presents. That is the message that attorneys Chris Mammen and Jay Silver ’81, partners at the law firm Womble Bond Dickinson, delivered to students at the Law School on Thursday, February 22, in a talk titled, “What You Need To Know About AI in Legal Practice.”
The current buzz surrounding AI is inescapable. It may be difficult to separate the signal from the noise and discern the lasting impacts of the technology on society. Lawyers will have to contend not only with the unique legal challenges that AI engenders, for clients and public interest organizations alike, but that these same transformational technologies will impact the very practice of law.
It is easy for lawyers to embrace the challenges that AI introduces for clients. The rapid adoption and deployment of AI technologies and applications pose numerous legal uncertainties that provide a “target-rich environment,” as Silver likes to think of it, for attorneys to help clients navigate. Mammen and Silver presented wide-ranging areas of concern that clients will regularly rely on lawyers to help navigate—particularly in the early phases of AI adoption before many of the legal challenges begin to be resolved—from privacy, data security, and regulatory concerns, to questions of intellectual property infringement, products liability, and professional liability. Uncertainty generates demand for legal counsel. Law students should be encouraged by this increasing demand and be prepared to take on the challenges companies will be faced with.
What may be more concerning for law students is the prospect of these same AI technologies and applications displacing employment in the legal sector itself. For instance, Mammen and Silver cited a 2023 report published by Goldman Sachs estimating that 44% of tasks performed by legal professionals could be automated by AI.[1] Although the precise distribution of legal sector employment displacement is difficult to predict, it is apparent that law firms, the destination of a majority of the Law School’s graduates, will have to prepare for the possibility of dramatic displacement and realignment of their workforces. Mammen and Silver pointed to at least three reasons for decreased demand for law firm employment.
First, law firms themselves will require fewer attorneys and legal professionals as AI applications perform the duties traditionally performed by associates—for instance, legal research, document summaries, and document drafting. Compounding this trend is the concomitant reduction in demand for external counsel at all as in-house counsel, who will likewise reduce their own staff, utilize their own AI applications to perform work previously outsourced to external counsel. Third, as legal services become easier to perform through AI applications, new types of professional services firms will increasingly enter the space and displace even more demand for the services of law firms. Mammen and Silver noted that the Big Four accounting firms, generally considered to be professional services firms, have already begun investing heavily in legal services technologies that perform work traditionally serviced by attorneys at law firms.[2]
The story Mammen and Silver presented thus far suggests a grim outlook for legal sector employment. Law students, in particular, may be discouraged as they contemplate the massive financial investments currently being expended to receive an education for a profession expected to be increasingly displaced by AI. However, dismay and resignation are premature, for the same technologies that challenge the traditional model of law firm services and employment create opportunities for a new class of legal professionals to adapt and forge a new model.
The changing nature of legal services will demand a new set of skills that attorneys have the opportunity to harness. Put another way, the value proposition for lawyers will shift, creating new opportunities for those attorneys capable of deploying AI applications within law practices effectively. For example, there are opportunities for attorneys and law firms to be leaders in the adoption of AI tools. Perhaps this means, as Mammen and Silver suggest, law firms should think of themselves as venture capital funds investing in the very legal technologies that will drive the legal services industry in the future. Perhaps it simply means effectively structuring law practices around AI technologies, efficiently allocating labor and developing competitive fee structures that retain and attract clients.
Also, opportunities will abound for “power users” of the AI tools law firms will have at their disposal. General tech skills and fluency will obviously become increasingly important for attorneys to possess, but so too will the skills necessary to evaluate AI outputs. Mammen and Silver propose that the model of law firm employment will “compress” the traditional path of attorneys and favor those who can become such “power users” proficient in evaluating AI outputs, as opposed to the traditional model that favored those attorneys who gained proficiency in many of the technicalities of legal work through the routine performance of repetitive tasks. Such repetitive tasks may become obsolete with the adoption of AI, so attorneys who can adapt to the new models of work while establishing themselves as trusted advisors for clients will be positioned to thrive in this new environment.
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cmz4bx@virginia.edu
[1] Briggs, et al., “The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth,” https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/2023/03/27/d64e052b-0f6e-45d7-967b-d7be35fabd16.html.
[2] Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG).