Lawyers don’t just want faster contracting from AI. They want something far bigger

Is this the year the jobs bomb goes off?

(Spoiler - no).

The abstract idea that AI will replace jobs suddenly became really real in the last couple of years. But for lawyers, the reality is that we’ve been here before.

Post-financial crisis, with the rise of legal operations in the US, you couldn’t move without bumping into the phrase ‘do more with less’. That was driven by bringing a business mindset to legal teams, with a tailwind from technology. 

It was a bit less sci-fi - no agents, no robots, a sprinkling of machine learning here and there. But doing more with less still meant having less.

The good news is that it didn’t mean tonnes of lawyers out of work. Instead it created new opportunities. In legal ops itself, guided by CLOC, led by the early pioneers like Connie Brenton, Jeffrey Franke, Stephanie Corey and Mary O’Carroll, armies of smart folks with and without law degrees set out to improve the experience and outcomes of legal within companies.

And for GCs, it meant leverage. I remember being wide-eyed when Adam Glick told us that he was still the only lawyer at Intercom, then a Series E company. A lack of a team certainly wasn’t holding Adam back from having the time to lead blockbuster transactions and highly strategic work at Intercom.

Based on what I hear from Juro customers, I don’t see huge growth happening in legal headcounts in the year ahead. But based on the conversations I see in our Community Slack, there’s some fascinating work out there for legal teams to take on.

So what do you want to be doing in 2025?

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Daniel Hulme joined me on the podcast this week, with an unbelievable CV - Chief AI Officer at WPP, CEO at Satalia, CEO & Co-founder at Conscium, entrepreneur in residence at UCL. While many people just woke up to AI in the last couple of years, he’s been pushing at the boundaries of what AI means for society and the professions for more than 17 years.

I learned so much from that conversation and it really busted some myths. Firstly he’s literally been creating jobs with AI for years now. Secondly, nobody wakes up in the morning looking forward to grinding through mundane tasks. If technology changes your job from mostly time spent on those mundane tasks to more time spent on creative thinking, that can only be a good thing.

Change in legal is always incremental. Sometimes it moves faster than it has before, but as much as technology entrepreneurs want to disrupt the industry overnight, the reality is that it always takes longer than anyone thinks - and that’s OK. It means we do things safely and have time to adjust.

What does this mean in practice?

That said, the teams we work with who’ve found ways to delegate the mundane parts of their jobs to AI are doing different work now than they were doing a year ago. I imagine they’ll be doing different work at the end of this year than they were doing at the beginning.

Team bandwidth might not be increased by additional colleagues. Those defaulting to headcount requests to get more work done will be sorely disappointed in 2025. 

But innovators who find ways to get at least some of that work at 1% of the price will win big. In their daily work, yes, (who wants to do grunt work?) but also in their career advancement.

The question for all of us is this: what kind of work do you want to be doing in 2026?

Making a big impact with a small legal team is the subject of our first webinar this year, with Victoria Ferguson and Michael Haynes joining me on the panel next Thursday at 2pm UK / 9am EST. We’d love to hear what kind of work you’re aiming to do over the next 12 months. We'd love to see you there.