Samantha Wellington, eBay’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, thinks the profession is panicking about the wrong people. AI will not gut the graduate ranks, she argues, because the AI-native juniors are the ones teaching firms how to rebuild their workflows. The lawyers who should be nervous are the mid-career middle managers, and anyone who quietly lets the machine erode their own writing.
Wellington runs hundreds of lawyers and lobbyists as eBay’s SVP, chief legal officer and secretary, a job she has held since October 2024, when she replaced Marie Oh Huber and started reporting to CEO Jamie Iannone and here current role lends some real power for young lawyers wondering where AI is taking them – and their legal careers.
She has an interesting ‘take’ on where the legal AI revolution is taking us.
Wellington has taken an unusal route to the top of her profession in corporate law. A beef farmer’s daughter from Kangaroo Valley, she studied law and acting simultaneously at Wollongong, did a bit part in Farscape, then went legal counsel at Foxtel, on to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, twelve years at Oracle ending as managing counsel for corporate securities and acquisitions, and a stint as TriNet’s chief legal officer before eBay.
She is currently steering the legal side of eBay’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Depop from Etsy and the daily chaos that US tariff and de minimis policy has made of cross-border trade.
Which lawyers does AI actually threaten?
The major fear for many is that firms slash graduate intakes to cut costs, and Wellington agrees that worry is legitimate.
But she flips the usual story saying the AI-native recruits are precisely the ones showing firms how to redesign processes around AI agents.
The genuinely exposed cohort, in her view, is the mid-career middle manager, the layer whose value was process supervision that legal AI now does faster.
It is a sharper read than most of what passes for thought leadership on the tools reshaping the back office.
Why does she tell lawyers not to let AI write for them?
Wellington calls her writing a superpower, a way of moving someone to a place they will feel comfortable, and frames the risk plainly by saying the more she leans on AI and stops keeping that muscle sharp, the more everyone’s abilities flatten to average.
Her acting training probably underwrites the point. Corporate America, she says, is just human psychology. Find out what your motivation is. Lawyers who forget how to, in pursuit of efficiency, may find efficiency was the booby prize.
