Extract from Damien Charlotin’s article, “What jobs will AI destroy? Exhibit A shouldn’t be on the list.”
Pity the lawyers: Whenever people want to dramatize the impact of artificial intelligence on white-collar work, they tend to reach for the legal profession as Exhibit A. Mustafa Suleyman, head of Microsoft AI, opined in February that legal tasks “will be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” A headline on a March op-ed from Richard Susskind, an authority on the intersection of tech and law, blared that “artificial intelligence could replace traditional lawyers by 2035.” And as newer, more advanced tools promising to revolutionize the profession just keep coming — Anthropic recently expanded its AI assistant’s legal offerings — it’s easy to assume lawyers are on the brink of extinction.
And yet: Lawyers have never been more numerous in the United States. Their ranks have swelled since 2020, with law school applications jumping nearly 40 percent over the last two cohorts. According to the American Bar Association, last year also saw the highest overall employment rate for law graduates ever recorded and the highest employment rate in jobs that require bar admission.
Amid the breathless hype and warnings of technological catastrophe, lawyers are doing fine, and they will continue to do so.
