You can draft an agreement using AI without going to a lawyer.
You can draft an agreement using AI without going to a lawyer.
You can take medicines after asking AI about your symptoms without going to a doctor.
You can write a LinkedIn post without hiring a content strategist.
But none of that makes you a lawyer, a doctor or a content strategist.
Every time I open LinkedIn, someone is posting about how AI now does their drafting, their writing, their thinking. And you can see the result. Everything reads the same. Everyone sounds the same.
I use AI. Most days. It saves me time on the parts of the work that were never the valuable parts.
But it does not know my client.
Someone will say I can just prompt it with everything I know about the client.
You can, but it still does not do the part that matters, because that part is not information, it is judgment.
AI will never tell a client that the post they want is a bad idea. It will write it, and it will write it well. It will not say that this is the wrong month to be visible on this issue, because the firm is on the other side of a matter that has not been reported yet. It will not say that a post which performs very well can still cost a referral relationship that took eight years to build.
It optimises for the post. I am being paid to think about the practice.
A lawyer works the same way. AI will list the compliances under labour law. A lawyer tells you which one the inspector actually checks, which one will surface in due diligence three years from now, and which one is not worth the cost of fixing today.
That gap is the entire job.
Having access to a tool is not the same as knowing what to do with it. And the people who confuse the two are usually easy to identify, because their work is indistinguishable from everyone else's.