What remains of lawyers’ work?

Folks recently held a housewarming party. The office filled with clients, partners, old friends and people with whom it was good to pick up the conversation where we had last left off. During the evening, we had many conversations that would never have begun with a calendar invitation. One person casually raised an issue that was not yet an engagement. Another explained what was really happening in their business at that moment. A third described a situation with several possible options but no clear direction. It is often in conversations like these that the work in which a lawyer can add the most value begins.

At the same time, the public debate is asking whether artificial intelligence poses a threat to lawyers’ work. An article in Helsingin Sanomat described how AI is automating legal work and making legal information more accessible. The idea is that, in the future, anyone will be able to draft agreements and appeals or produce legal analyses without an expensive expert. It is a fair question: what will be left of the legal profession?

Lawyers should not respond by downplaying AI. That would be intellectually lazy and poor client service. AI is already a useful tool for research, drafting and structuring different options. Many tasks that previously required a lawyer’s time can now be handled faster and at a lower cost, sometimes perfectly adequately without a lawyer.

From the client’s perspective, this is largely good news. Legal information should not be a privilege hidden behind unnecessary complexity. If AI helps people gain a better understanding of their rights, obligations or the terms of an agreement, it can improve access to justice. At the same time, it forces lawyers to articulate where their value actually comes from.

A lawyer’s value does not lie in legal-sounding text

Legal work has never been merely about producing text. A contract is more than a document, and legal advice is more than an answer to what the law says. AI can already produce useful drafts, summaries and outlines for legal arguments. This makes it increasingly difficult to justify charging for routine work, generic text or summaries of statutory provisions.

What matters more is the part of the work that begins not with a legal provision, but with the client’s situation: why the issue has arisen now, who will make the decision, what the client is trying to avoid and when a legally possible solution is a poor one in practice.

Perhaps the question is not what will be left of the legal profession. A better question is what has always been essential to it. As technology takes care of more of the work involved in organising information and preparing initial drafts, the lawyer’s role is to ensure that the right problem is identified and resolved in a way that makes sense for the client. A client may ask for an agreement when the real question is whether the proposed arrangement is worth pursuing at all. They may ask for a strongly worded letter when a single phone call would produce a better outcome. They may ask what the law permits when the decisive issue is what the decision will do to the client relationship.

Trust is still built between people

The housewarming party was a good reminder of why meeting people still matters. No one came because the information was unavailable on a website or because a message could not have been sent by email. They came because trust is built between people. It grows through conversations in which the question becomes clearer, the context emerges and each person gains a sense that the other truly understands what is at stake in that particular situation. In legal work, this remains crucial.

AI can be an excellent tool for lawyers as well. It can make work faster, improve preparation and make legal information more accessible. What it cannot do is eliminate the need for judgement, responsibility and trust. These do not arise from text alone, however skilfully that text may be written.

A great deal will remain of lawyers’ work if it has always involved more than producing documents. And if it has not, AI is entirely justified in forcing it to change.

Anna Paimela

Partner

anna.paimela@legalfolks.fi  

+358 40 1648626