AI will kill all the lawyers
62 comments
·December 19, 2025hackingonempty
xeckr
>You cannot practice law without "passing they bar"
You are however entitled to represent yourself without passing the bar, and thus use the AI to help your case.
Even for the remaining lawyers, I imagine that their billable hours will crater due to competitive dynamics.
jscottmiller
Perez Hilton tried this with some success: https://www.cjr.org/feature/perez-hilton-og-original-news-in...
woleium
interesting, so you can rep yourself, with assistance from an ai? or maybe someone you hired to use an ai, present as an amicus curiae?
esafak
You can't create derivative works of copyrighted material either, yet here we are. I'm sure they'll find a creative loophole.
jscottmiller
I agree, though I suspect we'll see something similar to what has happened with Doctors, where companies essentially rent the credentials.
null
stuffn
Given they have the power of life and death in their hands having them licensed and accountable is peace of mind.
Surely unions are too powerful in several industries. Police, medicine, and law. But not having some association holding these people accountable is a bad idea.
nickff
Most of these industry guilds tend to be capricious but forgiving, determined to protect members. Almost every (North American) union puts its members' well-being ahead of any possible accountability, which makes sense, but means they cannot be trusted to self-regulate.
jelled
Just like AI will kill all the software developers...
Obviously AI will change the legal industry. But a lawyer will still have an advantage because they know what questions to ask and can provide the AI with the relevant context.
mikeocool
And they know when it’s right and wrong.
Recently I asked Claude if I should convert my LLC to an S Corp for tax savings, and it sang the praises of how much I’d save if I did this.
When asked my accoutant, he pointed out that since I live in NYC, the S corp would be taxed in such a way that would completely wipe out the tax advantage I’d get elsewhere, and I’d likely end up paying more if I did this.
antinomicus
Did you tell the LLM you were in New York though?
kiernanmcgowan
Its a funny take because this reddit thread seems to suggest the opposite. Pro se litigants (people representing themselves) are using LLMs to create more lawsuits resulting in more work for lawyers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/comments/1n9cwfv/pro_se_...
bastardoperator
It has indeed killed several careers at this point, but not because it was better than a human, but because a lazy human used it and didn't check their work.
Freebytes
This article talks about martinis about as much as it talks about the careers of lawyers being threatened by AI. The article provides no real justification for its claims outside of anecdotal opinions. The only value of this article is that it results in a discussion in the comments section that provide the actual credence to the claims.
why_at
Like so many of these articles about how "AI will/won't do X" it just feels like everyone is speculating.
The only thing I feel confident about is that people are bad at predicting the future. Why can't we just wait and see without all this overconfident guessing?
vishnugupta
I read somewhere that it's not going to happen because the AI can't play gold with judges, senators, and congressmen over the weekend.
eschulz
You're right. Gold and golf are at the center of the legal world.
Verdex
Legal representation is the sibling of security.
Security itself is a journey, not a destination. To say that you are secure is to say that you have been so clever that nobody else in the history of ever again will ever be as clever as you just were. Even knowing that they can study you being clever.
Even a super intelligent AI might not be able to replace lawyerhood unless it is also dynamically going out into the world and investigating new legal theory, researching old legal theory, socializing with the powers that be to ensure that they accept their approach, and carefully curating clients that can take advantage of the results.
robotswantdata
Very much doubt, what you’ll see is it killing off paralegal work.
In most jurisdictions legal advice is a regulated and restricted activity. Qualified lawyers today get themselves into trouble without AI advising on areas they have no right to practice in.
zkmon
Any pure information-processing profession will be affected - programming, legal, teaching, financial, medical diagnosis, research, writing, videos, movies, music, art, design, architecture, business consulting, marketing, gaming, dating, chat, voice, customer support, real-time monitoring, ...
Any physical world interaction might survive for more time - cooking, goods delivery, transport, construction, medical testing, field work, lab work, class room work, handyman jobs, factory work, farming, mining, fishing, travel & tourism, retail shops, offices, gym, sports, fashion, hardware,..
simonw
> I mention the problem of ‘hallucinations’ – when an AI model presents false or fabricated information as factual – and the need for a human face in court. The Sandie Peggie judgment allegedly contained AI-made errors. He waves this all away. ‘Temporary bugs and sentimental preferences. The economic argument is overwhelming.’
As usual with "AI replacing humans", the key thing to consider here is accountability.
I want to get my legal advice from someone who is accountable for that advice, and is willing to stake their professional reputation on that advice being correct.
An LLM can never be accountable.
I don't want an LLM for a lawyer. I want a lawyer armed with LLMs, who's more effective than the previous generations of lawyers.
(I'd also like them to be cheaper because they take less time to solve my problems, but I would hope that means they can take on more clients and maintain a healthy income that way even as each client takes less time.)
The closing paragraph of that story:
> ‘My niece is a lovely girl, really smart, great at school, and the other day she told me she wants to be a lawyer. And I thought, “Oh my God, my little niece wants to be a lawyer”, and I flat out told her. I said please do not destroy your life. Do not get into a lifetime of debt for a job that won’t exist in ten years. Or less.’
Uh oh. Here we go again, with the "don't bother studying computer science, it's 2002, all the jobs will be outsourced to cheaper countries in the next few years!". So glad I didn't listen to that advice back then!
atmavatar
> I want a lawyer armed with LLMs, who's more effective than the previous generations of lawyers.
From what we've seen thus far, there's a non-zero chance the lawyer armed with LLMs will submit a brief generated by said LLM without reviewing it, which makes the judge none too happy.
Look at how people handle bringing their cell phones with them while driving. Some people won't use it at all. Some will play music (unrelated to driving but overall neutral as long as they aren't fiddling with it). Some will use it for GPS driving assistance (net positive). But, many will irresponsibly use it for texting/talking while driving, which is at least as bad as being inebriated and can lead to harming themselves and others.
Don't expect people to be any more or less responsible with LLMs.
simonw
I want my lawyer armed with LLMs to not do that.
There are some promising AI-driven tools these days that use search against archives of cases to help check that citations aren't garbage. I'm hoping lawyers start using them to help pick apart each other's laziness.
danaris
> I want my lawyer armed with LLMs to not do that.
The only way to guarantee that is to have a lawyer not armed with LLMs.
We've seen dozens of examples already of lawyers doing exactly that. (Some of them have then doubled down in court, to their eventual detriment.)
If you're making a habit of using LLMs to draft briefs for you, how long before you just forget to check the cited cases to replace the hallucinated ones with real ones? Or decide not to check, because surely they'll be fine this time...only they're not?
arctic-true
When I was thinking about law school the big panic was about e-discovery tools: we wouldn’t need many lawyers anymore since we didn’t need to rifle through boxes of physical paper anymore! What happened instead was that, with the burden of collecting documents significantly reduced, we were able to start looking for needles in much bigger haystacks.
elicash
I think theoretically, it's okay for LLMs to write legal briefs, to replace attorneys. Write the best argument you can with whatever tools you want.
What worries me is the idea of them replacing JUDGES.
unyttigfjelltol
Actually, that’s the high-value model. Imagine you have a bunch of LLMs tuned to different sensibilities that match great jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Learned Hand, maybe Aristotle to mix things up, maybe a real jurist. And your attorney tunes their arguments to be persuasive to whatever model they believe is dominant.
It’s a short leap to comparing model scores to determine a quick and dirty settlement “winner” which really isn’t that far from manual processes.
Lawyering will look different, but there definitely will be lawyers. Judging on the other hand…. Judging is the one I wonder about.
ericmcer
I imagine it would involve 1000s of LLMs outputting a judgement and then if there were significant disparities it would get flagged in some manner.
That's actually the plot of Minority Report, a lot of people think it is about "what if computers could predict crime" but it is really about "What do you do when your 'omniscient' machines disagree with each other".
Either way the idea of getting sent to prison and having 0 human interaction is terrifying.
y-curious
That is something I hadn’t even considered. That is super scary; Part of me thinks it’s inevitable. People famously lack any sort of empathy for the falsely accused until it happens to them, so why wouldn’t they vote for a “save the children: use AI judges!” bill in 10 years?
fmbb
”AI” started taking judges jobs at least over ten years ago. See tools like COMPAS.
Read Weapons of Math Destruction.
dasil003
Isn't there a Chris Pratt movie about this coming out in January?
Law has one of the strongest "unions" in the form of the Bar Association, backed by legal force. You cannot practice law without "passing they bar" as they say. The lawyers who operate the Bar can just decide they wont be replaced and then they wont, AI will remain a tool used by human lawyers.