When AI first reached the ears of the legal market some years ago there was a flurry of stories about the end of lawyers. For years afterward and with Pavlov dogs-like automation any mention of legal AI summoned up the panicked refrain: ‘The end of lawyers is coming, the end of lawyers is coming!’

This was until law firms and corporates actually started to make use of legal AI systems, especially in the last two years and even more so last year. The clichéd refrain, now exposed to the cleansing light of real experience, seemed to die away upon contact.

It turns out there were no androids or already out of date screen grabs from the 2004 Will Smith movie ‘iRobot’ based on the late great Asimov novel. There was just code, and it was good code too.

As to the way that AI would ‘disrupt’ the legal industry like a chainsaw cutting through a block of butter? It has changed things, yes, but disrupt? I don’t see any law firms collapsing because of AI. The big law firms that have collapsed recently did so because of weak management and careless accounting, which were very human problems. Legal tech was not the culprit.

In fact, here is a bet: the law firms that are adopting AI systems now will be the firms in five years that have larger revenues, higher profits and more contented staff.

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