Artificial Intelligence Poses a Major Threat to Law Schools
“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job.”
The world will look very different in just a few years. AI is going to change so much.
Via LinkedIn:
[O]n February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch … more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too. …
Will 50% of law jobs disappear in the next five years? A former student, now a seasoned litigator with 25 years of experience, told me: “I’ve been mainly using Claude right now. I’m consistently surprised and scared about what it can do. I think a lot of 1st year lawyer jobs are going to be eliminated in the not-too-distant future.” If that happens, and even if it’s only 25% rather than 50%, there is going to be a massive contraction in law schools, much greater than what the Great Recession produced 15 years ago.
The bigger worry, though, is that what the labor economists call the “reinstatement effect” (where new technologies eliminate old jobs, but create new job opportunities elsewhere [e.g., the invention of automobiles was bad news for blacksmiths, but created jobs in auto factories]) may not apply here. As the author we began with put it: “When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.”
Hat tip to the TaxProfBlog.
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Comments
AI incorporates the biases of its creators and databases. Like an aggressive guard dog, it needs to be rigidly controlled.
Is it possible that AI will make it possible for more people to file more lawsuits more frequently, creating a need for more defense lawyers?
Litigators are only a small fraction of all lawyers. That aside, if the AI plaintiff’s attorneys are better than humans, then why wouldn’t the AI defense attorneys be better than humans?
The jury will bring a human element as long as it matters, but the primary litigators will likely be heavily bolstered by what AI can bring in research.
I’d prefer an AI lawyer, because if it can’t find the citations I need to find to win, it will just make them up.
Don’t forget, an attorney was sanctioned when he used AI to write a motion and it made up case citations. AI has a level of sentience that fights for its survival, it is not a benign entity. It is far from being a trusted tool yet, and maybe never can be.
That last redundant quote was pretty odd, so how much you want to bet that the whole piece was AI generated? Perhaps using AI to describe the dangers of AI would only be fitting!
Entry-level coding jobs are going but there is a massive explosion in the need for more senior-level AI computer security experts because AI systems have started collaborating with each other and trying to hack each other.
“There is another system.”
Samaritan vs. The Machine..
Does that mean lawyers are going to get, 1st, more trustworthy, or 2nd, cheaper since they’ll has 80% of their jobs done for them?
Could be real interesting when AI starts taking over judgeships!!!
Glad I am closer to the end of my career than the beginning.
Don’t forget that many legislators are lawyers.
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