I was impressed by a recent interview of Antti Innanen on the Artificial Lawyer Law Punx podcast that I not only commented on it on LinkedIn, I decided to devote a whole article to his comments. After 30+ years in legal practice and covering legal tech, I’ve learned to spot industry BS when I hear it. The latest such platitude is: “AI will free us all up to do strategic work.” But the 12-minute podcast discussion by Innanen (who just so happened to have actually practiced law) cuts through the nonsense. The reality: Most legal work is neither tedious nor strategic, it’s just regular work. How much of this regular work will AI replace? Moreover, there’s not an infinite queue of high-level thinking waiting for displaced lawyers. We need to start asking harder questions about AI’s real impact instead of accepting feel good platitudes.
Here’s my post for Above the Law.