Today’s sign of the apocalypse: “Perkins Coie Turns to AI Avatars to Train Lawyers on Soft Skills,” from Law.com.

From the story:

Perkins Coie’s London office is beta testing a new training program using generative artificial intelligence-powered avatars developed in partnership with AI training platform Levra.

The avatars are designed to help lawyers of all experience levels simulate conversations with colleagues to build their soft skills, an area that Perkins Coie managing partner Ian Bagshaw told Law.com can also improve client services.

It turns out that I am, alas, a little late to this sorry party.

From the ABA Journal (May 7, 2026): “Lawyers at Perkins Coie in London work with AI avatars to boost soft skills”

From the Non-Billable site (March 15, 2026): “Perkins Coie is using AI avatars to teach junior lawyers how to talk to partners” (This story features this arguably unintentionally hilarious line: “As technology begins to automate more routine legal work traditionally handled by junior lawyers, firms are placing greater emphasis on teaching skills that are harder for software to replicate.”)

From LEVRA’s LinkedIn page (1 month ago): “We launched our Human Skills programme with the Perkins Coie London office and are seeing some powerful results and data insights: … ⚡ +28.6% increase in learner engagement.” Note, of course, the quantification of “results and insights.” To put that number and others in the LEVRA post into context, read C. Thi Nguyen’s excellent recent book “The Score,” which is all about how we (collectively) fool ourselves by keeping score when we should be living our best lives. For something similar, read Jerry Muller’s “The Tyranny of Metrics.”

In conclusion, and speaking as someone who practiced law for a decade and who has been teaching so-called “soft skills” to law students for 15 years: this episode – a major global Big Law enterprise outsourcing one of its core institutional missions to robots, presumably because the firm’s partners concluded that they do not have the time or talent to do this properly on a human-to-human basis, or that LEVRA costs less than the amount of money needed to do it properly themselves, or both – sums up an enormous amount of what is wrong with the private practice of law today. (Want to know what is right? Look into the biographies of the lawyers nominated for the 2025 “Mentor of the Year” award as part of the 2025 American Lawyer Industry Awards Program.) “Robot mentorship” offers a perfect opportunity to repurpose Bentham’s classic phrase: it is “nonsense on stilts.”

The only thing that I might imagine that might be worse would be … a law school’s offering robot-based “soft skills” training to law students. Which is happening, yes?