A barrister’s warning
In a stylish Soho bar, the narrator meets a senior English barrister—introduced anonymously as “James”—who believes AI will rapidly and devastatingly upend the legal profession. Once sceptical and moderate about technology, James has recently become convinced that AI will “destroy” law as it’s currently practised, far sooner than most lawyers expect.
He describes a recent experiment: a complex civil appeal he drafted over a day and a half was given, anonymised, to an advanced AI system. With careful prompting, the AI produced a superior document in about 30 seconds, at negligible cost—work James says matched the standard of an elite KC. From his perspective, this makes human competition economically impossible.
James predicts a cascade: first routine legal work, then drafting, citation, and argumentation will be automated. Process-driven areas like conveyancing and probate will be especially vulnerable, but even courtroom advocacy will increasingly rely on AI-generated submissions—prompting clients to question why they should pay high fees for human lawyers at all. In time, he suggests, even judges may be affected.
Concerns about AI “hallucinations” or the need for a human presence in court don’t impress him. He sees these as temporary issues outweighed by overwhelming economic incentives. He also argues that many lawyers underestimate the threat, believing AI is merely a tool rather than a replacement. Professional arrogance, he says, makes it psychologically hard for lawyers—who hold social and political power—to accept that they can be displaced by software.
James expects resistance: attempts to regulate or ban AI in law, followed by failure. The result, he predicts, will be mass job losses with wider social and political consequences, well beyond the legal sector. Despite the grim outlook, he’s oddly upbeat, suggesting the profession has brought some of this on itself through greed, complexity, and judicial activism—and that the shake-up might ultimately be healthy, even if destabilising.
His blunt advice to aspiring lawyers is stark: don’t do it. He urges young people not to take on debt for a career he believes may largely disappear within a decade.
Source : The Spectator
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