Lawyers must contend with the GenAI revolution on several fronts.

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First and foremost, lawyers must proactively and prudently advise their business clients on the risks and benefits of incorporating GenAI into the clients’ products, services, and back-office operations. The legitimate legal issues raised by AI-regulated regulation, privacy violations, intellectual property protections, etc. are material enough to warrant a separate section.

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Second, and addressed herein, lawyers must assess and action their own potential use of GenAI to deliver legal services.

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We recommend starting with Sense and Sensibility from our advisor Jae Um of SixParsecs and our friend Ed Sohn of Facto. Special acknowledgment to the superb job Legaltech News has done tracking GenAI in legal. We also commend Pinhawk and Brainyacts for legal-specific newsletters with great GenAI content.

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Lawyers have long objected to “non-lawyers” being entrusted with various forms of legal work because the non-lawyers have not been through the education necessary to pass the bar and ethics exams.* The theoretical performance delta is, apparently, so large that lawyers consider it better for a staggering proportion of legal needs to go unmet than for those needs to be partially met by non-lawyer means.* (So there is no doubt: we think this protectionism is gross)

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But a funny thing happened. Large language models started passing the bar* and ethics* exams with flying colors. Yet, now, apparently, the AI cannot be trusted with various forms of legal work because “it can't provide the personal touch that a human can provide...AI can't have that personal connection, or emotional support clients expect from their lawyers…AI cannot negotiate on behalf of clients as it lacks the interpersonal skills and judgment required to assess and understand the unique circumstances of each case.”*

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Leaving aside that GenAI seems pretty damn proficient at empathy* and negotiation*, this kind of goalpost moving offers false comfort. Even if true. There will always be things the machines cannot do. A car cannot nuzzle its rider like a horse. An email lacks the personal touch of a letter, handwritten with a quill on parchment. So what?

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There is no coherent abstraction that fits neatly under the term “lawyering.” Lawyering is a loose assortment of many different jobs to be done.* Various forms of automation, including various applications GenAI, may well improve, and even displace, lawyers at performing tasks that are, at present, commonly associated with lawyering.

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At LexFusion, we believe the automation of tasks (rather than jobs) will be absolutely essential because GenAI will increase the velocity and complexity of commerce. Lawyers will have more work than ever. Innovation and scale are the only option to keep pace with client needs.

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Jevon’s Paradox is that, over the long term, an increase in efficiency in resource use generates an increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease. That is, more fuel-efficient vehicles results in more overall fuel consumption because people drive more. Similarly, more efficient delivery of legal services should result in higher demand for legal services.

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Business clients are not the only ones who will be deploying GenAI in a manner that increases demand for legal services. Consumers, regulators, and plaintiffs’ attorneys will also turn to this tech to sustain demands, lawsuits, and investigations at volumes that currently seem inconceivable.

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Buckle up. It will be a bumpy ride. But there is little reason to believe that developments in AI will reduce the total demand for lawyers.

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