Dorna Moini, Lecturer in Law at USC Gould School of Law, teaching the “Legal Innovations Lab” there, and CEO of Gavel, a legaltech company, on Substack: “The legal profession has a 1–2 year window. Most lawyers will miss it. AI won’t replace lawyers, but one lawyer with AI will.”
If you want to know what’s coming in law, look at what already happened to engineering, a structurally similar discipline.
A Stanford study tracking millions of payroll records found that employment for developers ages 22 to 25 is down nearly 20% from the late 2022 peak. The engineers who were not using AI were the first laid off, and the whole arc of skepticism to ubiquity took eighteen months. …
When AI takes over the production layer of engineering, human engineers move up to more structural decisions managing the massive amounts of code that is now written. They become “systems architects.”
When AI takes over the production layer of law — drafting, review, and research — the path upward is narrower.
When engineers automate code, they build more products. When lawyers automate drafting, there aren’t more laws to write. And while there will surely be more lawsuits and there is a latent legal market, the legal work that is too expensive for those consumers today can increasingly be addressed by a smaller number of lawyers using technology. The “judgment” layer that lawyers assume will always require a human is thinner than they think.
(For more on Dorna Moini, listen to her interview on this 2002 episode of my “Future Law Podcast.”)
