The robot lawyers are coming. AI will replace lawyers . . yada yada, we hear it all. But is that the wrong question lawyers should be asking. The real question is what will clients still pay lawyers to do when AI can research, review, summarise, draft and analyse increasing amounts of legal work in minutes?
Attacking the invoice is more powerful than attacking the lawyers.
Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Future of Professionals research said that 71 per cent of in-house legal professionals expect their outside firms to change their commercial models as AI use increases.
Only 28 per cent of law firms say they have changed their pricing structures in response.
More ominously, 32 per cent of in-house lawyers say they are already reconsidering, or will reconsider within 12 months, relationships with firms that fail to demonstrate clear AI-enabled value.
In other words, clients have noticed that the machine works faster.
“The firms creating a true competitive advantage today are not the ones talking about AI. They’re the ones operationalizing it.” said Raghu Ramanathan, President of Legal Professionals at Thomson Reuters.
And that changes what constitutes valuable legal work.
Anthropic’s GC: Goodbye To Getting Rich From Tedious Work
Perhaps the bluntest answer has come from Jeff Bleich, general counsel of Anthropic.(left) who told the ABA White Collar Crime Institute that AI threatens the economic logic behind armies of lawyers performing repetitive work by the hour.
“I don’t think the billable hour is the solution,” he said.
AI is eliminating the sort of tedious work from which lawyers and firms have historically been able to make considerable amounts of money.
That doesn’t mean clients no longer need lawyers, but it does mean clients are less enthusiastic about paying premium rates for work a machine can perform in seconds.
What that leaves for the truly valuable lawyer is to move up the food chain and provide those things that AI’s automation machinery can’t do easily and that is providing strategy, negotiation, advocacy, risk assessment and all those other things that clients will pay a lawyer to do.
The Junior Lawyer Problem
There is, however, an awkward little problem, which is how to produce top senior lawyers with great judgment if machines perform much of the work through which junior lawyers traditionally acquired it?
The Thomson Reuters report found that 78 per cent of law firm professionals believe early-career lawyers depend upon experienced mentorship to develop skills that AI may now displace.
The Law Society of England and Wales similarly reported this year that AI was the standout concern among junior lawyers attending one of its events.
The anxiety is understandable. Junior lawyers were traditionally paid to research cases, review documents, prepare first drafts and perform due diligence, none of which are the glamour jobs that lawyers seek.
But they were nevertheless how lawyers learned.
The profession may therefore have invented a technology capable of removing drudgery while accidentally removing part of its apprenticeship system with it.
So What Is A Lawyer Worth?
The emerging answer from clients and legal industry leaders is surprisingly traditional.
A lawyer becomes valuable not because he or she can produce legal information, but because they know what to do with it. Lawyers need to know that while AI can produce a contract, signing it may be as terrible idea.
AI can find authorities, but it is the lawyer who remains responsible for determining whether they actually exist and whether they matter.
AI can also suggest litigation strategy, but it won’t be sitting beside the CEO explaining why losing a $500 million case was nevertheless the recommended course of action.
Legal futurist Richard Susskind (right) has spent decades arguing that technology would fundamentally alter legal services. His latest work pushes the question further still, asking what artificial general intelligence would mean for the legal market, access to justice and the rule of law.
And while lawyers have traditionally responded to such predictions with great confidence in a business that has survived email, Google, outsourcing and goodness knows how many previous announcements concerning the death of the billable hour (including our own).
This time clients have AI have all that too, which makes the question rather different.
The lawyers who prosper may not be those who can do the most legal work, but those whose judgment remains worth paying for after the machine has done the rest.
