Michele DeStefano (Miami; visiting at Harvard Law School), How Lawyers Can Add Value in the Age of AI, The Practice (July/Aug. 2026):

[T]he real question is not whether AI will replace lawyers. It is whether (and how) we will make ourselves irreplaceable. My [50 interviews with in-house lawyers, law-firm partners, and non-lawyer executives] make it clear that the lawyers who endure won’t be the ones with the best or fastest tools. What differentiates the lawyers who will matter are three human value-adds: Character. Client-centricity. Innovation. . . .

If character is the foundation and client-centricity is where you point it, innovation is [not simply technology but] how you deliver and scale both [character and client-centricity]. . . .

Here is the line I keep coming back to: innovation isn’t an idea problem so much as a marketing problem. The bottleneck is rarely the idea; it’s getting people to believe in it, adopt it, and change how they work. . . .

And where adoption stalls, it stalls on people, not on tools.

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