AI in Legal Work
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Where AI earns its place in a law firm
Document review. The classic case: hundreds of thousands of emails and contracts, and the task is "find everything about the 2019 acquisition". Models read them all and rank what matters — work that used to fill rooms with associate hours.
Research and drafting. Case-law summaries, first-draft contracts, discovery requests. Tools trained only on verified legal databases exist precisely to avoid the failure mode below.
The cautionary tale every professional should know
In 2023 a New York firm filed a brief full of case citations that did not exist — invented wholesale by a hallucinating chatbot. The court sanctioned the lawyers; the legal world reprinted the story as a warning label.
The lesson generalizes far beyond law: AI is a brilliant first-draft machine and a terrible authority. A professional who verifies every citation is faster than ever. A professional who doesn't is faster at being wrong.
What it means if you need a lawyer
Routine work (review, research, standard drafting) gets cheaper and faster. The expensive human judgment — strategy, negotiation, accountability — does not discount.