Extract from Barclay T. Blair, Bennett B. Borden, and Danny Tobey’s article “Law Firms of the Future Will Be Different in Three Critical Ways”
Barclay T. Blair, Bennett B. Borden, and Danny Tobey envision how law firms in the world of AI will soon experience a transformation. If firms restructure to take advantage, they could unlock opportunities and increase revenue.
The law firm of the future is already here. We just don’t recognize it.
What does the law firm of the future look like? To answer this question, we must first decide what future we are talking about. The near future?
Or perhaps the science-fiction future—the one more likely to be entertaining than accurate. After all, we still don’t have hoverboards from Back to the Future’s version of 2015 or Soylent Green’s (spoiler alert) human food of 2022.
Let’s focus on the foreseeable future—the one being shaped by forces we can see today.
Here are three critical ways the law firm of the future will be different.
Working With AI
We don’t need a crystal ball to see that AI is already transforming the practice of law. The emergence of generative AI points the way to a future where AI is embedded at every level of an attorney’s work. Study after study shows that lawyers are uniquely exposed to the capabilities of AI, given that nearly everything they do involves the input and output of information.
