I presume there is no path from law school to senior lawyer/partner/whatever without first going through being a junior lawyer.
So, replacing the hiring and training of junior lawyers to save some bucks by replacing them with AI will mean a lack of senior lawyers in a decade
LLMs replacing the entry level “clerk” work might be great from a financial perspective of the existing firms, you’re absolutely right that it’ll have long term effects. In the short term though, it’ll mean more law grads are going to fail to find work, and attrition effects will kick in earlier. So we’ll see even more mortgage brokers and real estate agenst and such with law degrees who have never practised.
In any professional path, there’s a sort of junior-years attrition that occurs – a sort of professional darwinism where some make it through the grind of the junior years, and others peel off to adjacent careers. This will further frontload that attrition, because the number of junior positions available will be even smaller. But it won’t eliminate it.
I experienced this funnel. I’m 40 now and survived it, starting my own business in my profession (geophysics). But the number of colleagues that I’ve seen bail over the years is astoundingly high. Some of them became remarkably successful by leveraging transferable skills from their initial profession, but others just end up as bartenders. The professions are vastly oversubscribed, sadly.
I presume there is no path from law school to senior lawyer/partner/whatever without first going through being a junior lawyer.
So, replacing the hiring and training of junior lawyers to save some bucks by replacing them with AI will mean a lack of senior lawyers in a decade
LLMs replacing the entry level “clerk” work might be great from a financial perspective of the existing firms, you’re absolutely right that it’ll have long term effects. In the short term though, it’ll mean more law grads are going to fail to find work, and attrition effects will kick in earlier. So we’ll see even more mortgage brokers and real estate agenst and such with law degrees who have never practised.
In any professional path, there’s a sort of junior-years attrition that occurs – a sort of professional darwinism where some make it through the grind of the junior years, and others peel off to adjacent careers. This will further frontload that attrition, because the number of junior positions available will be even smaller. But it won’t eliminate it.
I experienced this funnel. I’m 40 now and survived it, starting my own business in my profession (geophysics). But the number of colleagues that I’ve seen bail over the years is astoundingly high. Some of them became remarkably successful by leveraging transferable skills from their initial profession, but others just end up as bartenders. The professions are vastly oversubscribed, sadly.