I’ve written a number of posts here about how Generative AI is making its way into law teaching and legal scholarship. This post has to do with legal expertise as such, as the “destination” of professors’ effort. We are legal experts, helping to produce expertise and to train more experts. How is Generative AI changing the conditions of that premise? How might those conditions change in the future?

More below the jump, with a link to a recent Substack essay about technology and law.

Many law professors (perhaps most, or even all) work with a mental model of legal expertise in which that expertise is embodied in individual lawyers advising and representing clients, and in legal institutions that house individual lawyers delivering legal information and making decisions about and with the law. The latter group includes, as “we” all know, courts, administrative agencies, legislative bodies, and other public ones; law firms and offices, company law departments, and other private ones; law schools and faculties; and NGOs and state-supported international and transnational organizations. Collectively, those represent the blend of “future of work” and “future of expertise” that law graduates (still) look forward to.

In what respects is that blend changing? In what respects is Generative AI re-organizing the practices of legal expertise in ways that diverge from that mental model? “Future of work” questions have been around for a long while and long before Generative AI hit mass culture in late 2022. But the precise question above occurs to me as I learn about Mercor, one of the hottest Generative AI companies of 2025. Read on for a summary of what Mercor does (gathering and marketing human expertise and supplying it to companies that produce Gen AI products) and for the centrality of legal expertise in the narrative. Should any of that matter to law schools and professors today and looking ahead?