The salaries range from $190,000 to $235,000 per year, excluding bonuses, numbers that bring tears to the eyes of many hard-working, experienced and highly-skilled trial lawyers, the babies of Biglaw earn incomes that bear no relation to the value they bring to the table. The only drawback is that their work went from engagement in the practice of law that prepared them to be lawyers one day to the indignity of document review, work best suited to back office drones.
With the incorporation of AI by Biglaw into its mind-numbing grind, even that may soon be gone.
There are growing signs that artificial intelligence poses a real threat to a substantial number of the entry-level jobs that normally serve as the first step for each new generation of young workers. Uncertainty around tariffs and global trade are only likely to accelerate that pressure, just as millions of 2025 graduates enter the work force.
No, it’s not just baby lawyers at risk, but the incoming entry-level workers in many “knowledge” jobs.
Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder. In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging — the ways junior developers gain experience. In law firms, junior paralegals and first-year associates who once cut their teeth on document review are handing weeks of work over to A.I. tools to complete in a matter of hours.
What is meant by “cut their teeth on document review” is unclear. It might have been necessary for firms to have people review the massive quantity of crap documents in discovery, but it was never the sort of thing that young lawyers did to train them to be competent experienced lawyers. It was drudgery that had to be done, but at least it gave them something to do since they were hardly equipped to be actual lawyers yet.
These changes coincide with a shift appearing in the latest employment numbers. The unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30 percent since September 2022, compared with about 18 percent for all workers. And while LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index, a measure of job and career confidence across nearly 500,000 professionals, is hitting new lows amid general uncertainty, members of Generation Z are more pessimistic about their futures than any other age group out there. Meanwhile, in our recent survey of over 3,000 executives on LinkedIn at the vice president level or higher, 63 percent agreed that A.I. will eventually take on some of the mundane tasks currently allocated to their entry-level employees.
For those of us who remember the “lost generation” of lawyers who came out of law school in 2008-09, and found no jobs awaiting them, this state of affairs sounds all too familiar. What happens when the first year associates are no longer needed for doc review, that AI can handled with similar mediocrity but at a speed that dwarfs human involvement and a cost that’s a fraction of these astronomical salaries? Bear in mind that AI is never sick. AI never complains. AI never complains of discrimination or harassment. Sure, AI aspires to mediocrity, but doc review by these bored kids was hardly the height of legal talent either.
And it won’t just be the Class of 2025 that’s lost to AI, but the classes that follow as well. So what becomes of the great and talented lawyers of the future? It’s appearing more and more likely that they will end up being very much like the lazy and mediocre lawyers of the present.
From Damien Charlotin, 87 cases so far, mostly from the U.S. but also from Brazil, Canada, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, and the UK. I expect that there are many more out there that didn’t make the list (especially since many state trial court decisions don’t end up in computer-searchable databases, and I expect the same is true for other countries’ courts).
Note that the pace has been increasing: There are more than 22 listed (all but five from U.S. courts) over the last 30 days alone.
No competent lawyer has AI do what clients are paying him to do. You can always tell work produced by AI, prolix repetitive language and a shallow understanding of concepts. And then there’s the hallucinations, which is a cool way of saying AI makes stuff up. At the absolute minimum, any lawyer who uses AI work product without scrutinizing every word, every cite, deserves every sanction levied. More to the point, they don’t deserve to be a lawyer, to be entrusted with another person’s life or fortune.
But in the glorious future envisioned by the AI Gods, where AI replaces even the least desirable work of over-paid Biglaw peons, how will mush-minded baby lawyers turn into skilled, competent and experienced lawyers? When teeth are cut on mediocrity, if they’re cut at all, there is little future for baby lawyers.
For the poor clients who are paying dearly for their AI counselors, the best they can hope for it that their AI bots read SJ rather than ATL so their arguments have at least the gloss of substance rather than the delusion of woke smugness. But frankly, there is a strong and unfortunate likelihood that none of this will matter much, as Grok will decide who wins and loses for whatever reasons Elon decides.