A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow for the Legal Profession

A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow for the Legal Profession

Disney invited visitors to imagine the home of the future. Here is what the courthouse, the law firm, and the law school of the future look like.

If you have visited Walt Disney World, you may remember traveling through four generations of an American family on the Carousel of Progress. Throughout the attraction, the theme song “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” anticipates a brighter future. Disney’s fascination with what lay ahead extended well beyond that one attraction. At Disneyland, the Monsanto House of the Future showcased synthetic building materials, intercoms, speakerphones, and appliances designed to make household tasks easier. Some of those ideas became commonplace. Others never arrived at all, which is usually how the prediction business goes.

Walt Disney wasn’t a lawyer, so we don’t know how he might have envisioned the future of the legal profession. But we can dream, can’t we? Developments already underway allow us to sketch a plausible future for three major legal institutions: courts, law firms, and law schools.

The lawyers and firms most likely to thrive will treat AI as a tool while remaining accountable for the work it helps produce.

Case Timelines Get Shorter

With judicial headaches and impatience over fabricated citations in legal pleadings continuing to dominate reporting on artificial intelligence, it is easy to overlook the boon that technology promises for judicial operations.

Start with the court. Administrative work around the courthouse, the kind that requires no legal analysis, is going to be automated: real time transcription of hearings, translation services, scheduling. AI will also become a standard support tool for judges and their staff. Clerkbots will not substitute their analyses for the judge’s own, but they will summarize opinions and submit first drafts of dispositions in routine matters. Case timelines shrink.

Evidence rules in federal and state courts will be rewritten, perhaps drastically, to address deepfakes and synthetic evidence. That work is already underway.

Courtrooms themselves will keep getting more hybrid and more adaptive. Building on the innovations the pandemic forced into practice, video conference and livestreamed proceedings, real time transcript displays for jurors and courtroom redesigns can now be built on an infrastructure that already exists and is ready to absorb what comes next. Much of that infrastructure is operating at scale today.

New governance and oversight structures will emerge to preserve trust in judges’ work. Courts and bar associations will demand explainability, run bias audits and set formal ethical standards before recommendations produced by AI on matters such as bail, sentencing or evidence rulings are accepted within the legal community.

Automation Lowers Client Costs

Conversations among law firms increasingly focus on how to compete in an environment shaped by AI, and on how the resulting efficiencies should benefit clients.

It takes no crystal ball to observe that document review, discovery and legal research are already supported by artificial intelligence. Work that once required substantial attorney time is now completed far faster, which frees lawyers to spend their attention on strategy and judgment rather than volume.

The billable hour will come under significant pressure. Sophisticated clients, familiar with AI in their own business operations, will decline to pay for hours of document review that software now completes almost instantly.

The more interesting consequence may be who gets served. Legal help has always been rationed by cost, and the cost has always been attorney time. When the hours required to handle a routine matter fall by an order of magnitude, the economics of serving clients who could never previously afford representation begin to change. Firms may find that categories of work they once declined as unprofitable, such as simple landlord tenant disputes, benefits appeals and family law matters, can be handled sustainably at volume. Legal aid organizations and court self-help centers stand to gain the most. Whether the access to justice gap actually narrows will depend less on the technology than on whether anyone builds a durable business model around it.

Technology competence in the form of AI literacy is now a professional skill. Bar associations and other regulatory bodies increasingly treat the duty of competence as including an obligation to understand how AI tools work and to verify their output, which raises malpractice exposure for lawyers who use AI without proper training.

The profession is only now working through other ethical questions that did not exist a few years ago:

• To what extent are materials generated by AI discoverable?
• What guidance should litigators give to potential expert witnesses regarding AI use?
• Do lawyers owe clients a duty to disclose the use of AI in their matters?
• Can a client’s use of AI waive privilege?

Hiring will follow. Law firms are already beginning to emphasize judgment and interpersonal skills in their hiring and training, prioritizing client management, negotiation, and analytical judgment in litigators.

Artificial intelligence may also, before long, support litigation strategy in a meaningful way. It is not difficult to imagine associate bots analyzing trial transcripts in real time and suggesting which lines of questioning to pursue. Predictive analysis of litigation outcomes, a nascent technology today, will gain wider deployment soon.

Law Schools Teach New Competencies

Where is legal education headed? Traditional law school curricula face two pressing challenges: training the next generation of lawyers to use artificial intelligence competently and rebuilding teaching methods that no longer work now that students use AI for research and writing.

Competency in law related technologies will become a mandatory part of the curriculum.

Oral examinations and in person writing will supplant take home written testing. Law students will be asked to defend, out loud, the assertions made in their research papers.

Curricula will prioritize judgment, ethics and verification, and will downgrade traditional measures of legal acumen such as legal research and document drafting.

Clinical and experiential learning, including supervised work requirements, will take up more of the law school experience. Oral advocacy, teamwork, project management and negotiation will all get greater emphasis.

Preparing for Constant Change

No one can predict precisely how quickly these changes arrive. Lawyers can prepare now by understanding how AI tools work, verifying their output, protecting confidential information and using the new efficiencies to serve clients more effectively.

AI can support research, drafting, analysis and administration, but it cannot assume a lawyer’s ethical responsibilities or replace professional judgment and human relationships. The lawyers and firms most likely to thrive will treat AI as a tool while remaining accountable for the work it helps produce.