Why would anyone become a lawyer in 2024?

If Goldman Sachs is right and 45% of legal tasks can be automated, then by taking the traditional route - university, law school, training contract, newly qualified (NQ) lawyer at a law firm - are you joining a dying industry??

If technology companies like Juro are right about how dramatically AI will change legal work, is it even sensible to join the profession? As a father of two young kids in school, how should I respond if they tell me they want to follow in my footsteps and become lawyers?

Like any good parent, I decided to ask the various ex-lawyers and law grads at Juro to tell me why they chose law. Here’s what they said:

“I ran the debating society at school and loved getting into the details and making my case so it seemed like a natural thing for me to move into. And I liked being right!”

“I liked the idea of arguing for a living, and liked the analytical side of it. It helped that it paid well … and it's pretty satisfying knowing that you have the knowledge and skills to stop people messing you about”

“I liked essay subjects like history, politics and economics. It felt like law broadly covered all whilst being practical, employable and relevant … also watching a lot of Suits in sixth-form”

“Family lawyers are expensive - I thought I might be able to do it myself”

“It seemed hard intellectually and I thought my parents would understand it and be proud”

Personally, I was drawn to the law because as a child I was good with words, and it seemed like a good way to put my ‘words brain’ to use.?

But I’ve welcomed a series of guests in quick succession on our Brief Encounters podcast who really made me think about what it means to be a lawyer, in this age of AI and automation. And honestly I’m unsure.

I spoke to pioneering CEO and founder Dana Denis-Smith , relentlessly innovative GC Andrew Cooke ; and Jake Jones , co-founder of the seriously exciting AI startup, Flank . All of them took very different routes to where they ended up, and all of them make an outsized impact on how legal tasks are delivered.?

Like any modern founder would, let's start with ‘why’.

Why do we need lawyers at all?

Well, because statute, regulation and case law are created at an astonishing rate these days. We’ve always needed lawyers to help people understand all this stuff and apply it in their lives, their businesses, their use cases. Lawyers typically have big brains (perhaps medium in my case) - they need to, so they can remember things and critically analyse fact patterns.?

But AI is getting really, really good at this, really quickly. It might not be long before this isn’t anywhere close to being the human lawyer’s USP. So why throw our hat in the ring?

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All our mums can’t be wrong … can they?

There’s no doubt that some grads are attracted to the legal profession - understandably - for material reasons. Lawyers at both large and small firms tend to earn more money than most people. ‘Lawyer’ is a high-status job - people readily understand it, and generally respect it as an answer to the question ‘what do you do?’. Indeed my mum still seems to hope I’ll go back to being one.

NQ lawyers are paid so well, particularly in London (some firms pay salaries of ￡180,000+ to box-fresh lawyers with 2 years' experience) partly due to a distorted market. In the US, lawyers who make it through university and then law school typically have something approaching half a million dollars in debt. They need high salaries to service it.?

When those firms hire in London, they pay similar rates to offer fair remuneration across the firm;? and then UK firms need to pay the same to compete for the best talent.

If you’re involved in the bunfight to try and reach those salaries, the early years as a trainee and then an NQ are a lot of fun - in some ways, at least. But boy, is there a lot of grinding through routine admin. I spent long hours doing NDA reviews for private equity clients, where I marked up the exact same type of contract in the exact same way, manually, hundreds or perhaps thousands of times.?

I’d like to think I did it well, but in 2024, AI could do it better, in a few moments, for free (though law firm hourly rates remain stubbornly high and climbing).

It’s not hard to think of more trainee- or NQ-level tasks which my generation all laboured through, and can now be automated entirely: due diligence review, eDiscovery, writing summaries - the list goes on. Without those tasks, what will NQs do? And what will they go on to be?

If Andrew Cooke is right - and stay tuned for his episode on 11th November - then we should all get comfortable with a dramatic premise. The production of legal deliverables - contract drafts, policies, reviews, notes and analysis - will be fully automated in almost all cases by AI. Whether that’s in two years, five years or ten years, it’s happening.

When that happens, what’s left for the lawyer?

Mum always wanted me to be a product manager

In Andy’s view, the lawyer becomes much more like a product manager for legal deliverables. Just like a PM, they do deep research on customer needs; they have high levels of empathy and curiosity; they identify the core problems for their end-users; and they design the process that delivers the solution.?

They’re not heavily involved in the delivery of that solution - because they don’t need to be. If it’s a policy, AI can write it in a second. If it’s a contract review, well that can be hard-coded in your AI Assistant playbook and left on autopilot.?

But identifying the need for the policy, and setting the guardrails in the playbook - ? Only a human, with a human understanding of the complex web of risk appetites and competing interests that shape a growing company, can design a solution that users can live with.

Newly qualified me reviewing NDAs, in the same way, ad infinitum, haunts me every day. That friendly ghost is almost a founding myth of why products like Juro need to exist. But I’m also conscious every day of the legal advice I receive, and the encounters I have, that add immense amounts of value to me as a business leader - and simply can’t be touched by AI.

Is winter coming?

When we hired Michael Haynes , I immediately threw him under the bus and dropped him into the #legal-review channel. At that time it was a febrile, exciting, primal place where sales reps made unreasonable demands of me both in substance and response time, because I let them. Let’s call it a ‘flat hierarchy’.

As soon as we had an experienced GC on board, I quietly tiptoed out and left him to handle the onslaught.

How inefficient. Michael doing routine contract review is fine - he could do it with his eyes closed. But he quickly moved himself upstream; first with a separate playbook to let reps self-serve, and then with an AI playbook in Juro. By teaching Juro’s AI his preferred positions, risk tolerances and fallbacks, he can make 95% of that work happen without him.

But deciding our risk position and socialising it to the sales team, via technology? Leading the team through training to raise their contract IQ so you can remove yourself?! That’s a combination of judgement, situational awareness, commercial awareness, presentational skills and empathy that can only be done by a person.

While some relics - billable hours, barristers’ wigs, Chitty on Contracts’ annual 8% price rise - are stubbornly resilient, the legal profession of 2030 will be radically different to what we’ve known. If legal’s role is more akin to product manager, it’s different, yes; but your potential impact within and without the business is immeasurably bigger.

What this means for training, trainees, NQs and salaries is unclear, but what I do know is that change isn’t coming. It’s here.