The identity opportunity for lawyers

Generative AI will take over legal task performance and catalyse an identity crisis for the legal profession, unless lawyers instead turn this into an opportunity to redefine their purpose and value, writes Jordan Furlong.

In short:

• The advent of generative AI is changing the nature of legal work and causing lawyers to think about their future identities.
• Lawyers should embrace an ‘identity opportunity’ whereby they can redefine their value and purpose.
• The opportunity exists for lawyers to decide what they would like to do, rather than just what they have traditionally been expected to do.

“Look on the bright side, Dad,” said Lisa Simpson. “Did you know the Chinese use the same word for ‘crisis’ as they do for ‘opportunity?’”

“Yes,” replied Homer, solemnly. “Crisi-tunity.”

The Chinese language doesn’t actually use the same word for both these concepts. But thanks mostly to a 1959 campaign speech by John F. Kennedy, many Westerners believe otherwise. So it’s a useful metaphor for a point I want to make today about lawyers’ self-image and future purpose in a post-AI world.

Earlier, I wrote about how lawyers have a deeply entrenched identity as impressively bright and hard-working problem-solvers, distinguished by their legal expertise and professional skill. They are proud of their intelligence (I still remember my Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, percentile and I’m pretty sure you do too) and their academic accomplishments (will I find a ‘Magna Cum Laude’ on your website bio? Be honest). ‘Smart and diligent’ is a great compliment to give a lawyer.

This core identity of the legal profession (not to be confused with individual lawyers’ professional identity) is embedded throughout the profession’s infrastructure. High-profile law firms habitually seek to recruit ‘straight-A’ students from the ‘best law schools’, despite the lack of causal connection between academic performance and practice success. Law students, in turn, seek out these kinds of firms (or at least, they used to) as the most desirable destinations, despite (or maybe because of) their reputation as extremely hard-working environments.

Generally speaking, this is who we think we are as lawyers: intelligent, insightful, diligent professionals who solve legal problems and get legal things done. Now here’s our challenge: Someone has invented a machine that solves legal problems and gets legal things done without any lawyerly intelligence, insight, or diligence at all.

An irresistible force

This technology, of course, is generative AI; specifically, Large Language Models that can replicate much of the work lawyers do. LLMs are gradually being implemented throughout the legal system, causing great consternation about how they’ll affect production cycles, pricing systems and associate training. But I think their greatest long-term impact could be on how lawyers define themselves professionally.

Partly, this impact will manifest itself in lawyers’ gradual displacement from their most common and revenue-producing activity: performing legal tasks. In legal workplaces that are adopting LLMs, the process of actually accomplishing a specific law-related job is slowly shifting from humans to machines.

So, for example, a lawyer might once have devoted an hour to carrying out a particular task. With AI, they might instead spend 10 minutes prompting the LLM to perform the task and another 10 minutes reviewing and refining its output. This process is often described as ‘the AI augments the lawyer’, and that’s true as far as it goes. As the technology advances and the quality of the output improves, however, I suspect we might soon be phrasing it as: “The lawyer augments the AI.”

All of this obviously has implications for a billable-hour culture — 40 minutes of lawyer effort will no longer be invoiced to a client. But I think the more important impact is that the lawyer won’t be doing the legal work anymore. The lawyer will be doing other work, arguably higher-value work — they’ll be efficiently and effectively instructing the LLM, accurately and diligently assessing its output, and making the output presentable for a client or judge.

But that’s not what lawyers have always done, and it’s not what many would prefer to do — because doing the work is what gave them their professional purpose. And that’s the other way in which the integration of LLMs into legal task performance will throw lawyers for a loop: Their most treasured assets will start to lose their unique value.

Lawyers have so many amazing attributes and capacities:

• knowledge of legal doctrine and legal system infrastructure
• application of complex legal reasoning and analysis
• composition and execution of effective legal instruments
• provision of legal advice through thoughtful recommendation.

LLMs don’t possess any of these human capacities, and they never will. But that won’t matter, because LLMs use a blindingly fast process of statistically driven probability calculation to produce the same kind of output that hard-working lawyers generate with all their talent and skill, and they can do it much more quickly and affordably. If Gen AI never gets any better than it is today, LLMs will still become integrated into legal task performance. But if Gen AI does get better, then inexorably, LLMs will become the primary means by which legal work gets done.

What now?

What will this mean for lawyers, the legal sector’s incumbent task performers? What will it mean for all their value hierarchies and status signals — getting onto Law Review, surpassing billable-hour quotas, becoming the ‘expert’ in a given subject? What will make lawyers uniquely who they are, once a substitute source has emerged for what they always used to do?

When people start questioning who they really are, what their purpose and value are, psychologists call that an ‘identity crisis’. That’s what I think is looming ahead for the legal profession. So now is the perfect time to get ahead of that crisis, and turn it into an identity opportunity.

Lawyers are unaccustomed to the question: “What would you like to do?” Or: “What would you like to be?” Most lawyers have learned to enjoy their work; but I think that many often find that work to be constricting. They perform legal tasks because that’s what people will pay them for, or because that’s what the partners demand in exchange for continued employment, or because that’s what everyone around them has always done.

Lawyers arrive in the practice of law to find all the structures and systems of task performance already prepared for them: a chair into which to slide, a docket into which to enter hours, a pile of tasks through which to plow. They adapt to these expectations quickly — task-based, accomplishment-oriented, praise-seeking folks that they are — and just as quickly, they come to accept these structures and systems as natural and inevitable.

But they’re not. Generative AI is proving that, day by day, and it’s giving lawyers an opportunity to think differently about themselves and their value and purpose. Very soon, that opportunity will become a mandate. And so the faster lawyers start the soul-searching and purpose-seeking, the better.

Because there is plenty for lawyers to do that generative AI is incapable of doing or replicating. The most obvious is legal agency and representation, using advocacy and negotiation to achieve a client’s outcomes through legal channels and societal institutions. It’s a cliché to say, “An AI will never stand up for you in court”, but it also happens to be true. And it doesn’t have to only be in court.

But there’s much more. A lawyer can develop trusted fiduciary relationships with a client, through which the lawyer accompanies the client on their journeys with support, advice and wisdom. A lawyer can be a strategic partner and planning resource for individuals and businesses alike, identifying risks and seizing upon opportunities as they arise. A lawyer can design systems for better access to legal remedies, negotiate understandings and agreements that bring an end to conflicts, and safeguard the institutional foundations of justice.

Time to give it a try

“No one’s going to pay me to do these things,” a lawyer might object. To which I’d reply: “Have you tried? Have you organised and prioritised your talents and skills to deliver these services? Have you made the effort to find out where people are really in need, really hurting, really looking for a proficient and trustworthy expert who gives a damn?” Because let me tell you, they’re out there, and they are legion.

Most importantly, have you asked yourself: “What would I like to do? What would bring me a new and different sense of satisfaction and accomplishment — something I always assumed wasn’t available, or that I’ve been quietly yearning for all these years?”

That’s not an identity crisis erupting. That’s an identity opportunity unfolding. And that’s what every lawyer, sooner or later, will find themselves engaged in. I recommend sooner.

Jordan Furlong is a Canadian legal sector analyst, author and advisor working to accelerate the arrival of a new and better legal system. Over the past 25 years, he has served as a lawyer, legal journalist, law firm consultant and globally acclaimed keynote speaker.

[This article was first published on the Substack media platform and is reproduced with the approval of Jordan Furlong.]