The more I use AI as a lawyer, the more convinced I am of two things:
The more I use AI as a lawyer, the more convinced I am of two things:
• It's going to fundamentally change the practice of law.
• And human judgment is going to become more valuable, not less.
I'm not naive enough to believe the legal profession is somehow sheltered from the reach of AI. I've experienced firsthand just how capable it can be, and I can say without hesitation that it has made me a better lawyer. I use it to challenge my thinking. Pressure-test arguments. Find the weakness in my reasoning. Sometimes it confirms my thinking. And sometimes, it changes it. Both are incredibly valuable.
But the better I get at using AI, the more aware I am of where my value lies.
I can give AI the contract. The transaction structure. The financing considerations. The business objective. I can explain the personalities involved and give it a very, very good prompt.
But I can't give it everything. Because I don't actually know everything I'm relying on when I make a judgment call.
Judgment is accumulated experience. It's the deal that went sideways ten years ago. The provision that looked harmless until someone used it against me. The negotiation where I pushed too hard. The one where I didn't push hard enough. The financing issue that taught me that the technically safest legal answer can be a terrible business answer. It's reading body language. Hearing the inflection in someone's voice. Understanding personalities. And a billion other little pieces of information acquired over a lifetime.
Eventually, those experiences stop feeling like individual pieces of information that can be identified and plugged into a prompt and become something more.
They become instinct. Intuition. And because no two lawyers have accumulated exactly the same experiences, each of us brings something different to the judgment we exercise.
That's why I don't think the most interesting question is whether AI will replace lawyers. It WILL replace some legal work. And I suspect it will change what clients and businesses are willing to pay lawyers to do.
But the more interesting question is: What becomes more valuable when information, analysis and drafting become increasingly accessible?
I think the answer is JUDGMENT.
Will technology one day find a way to fully externalize human judgment when we can't even identify everything that produced it? I don't know.
And oddly enough, that realization doesn't make me less enthusiastic about AI. It makes me more enthusiastic about using it for what I think it does extraordinarily well. And perhaps unexpectedly, it has given me a much clearer understanding of what I bring to the table.
AI can help me get to a decision. It can challenge my assumptions, reasoning and arguments.
And that's important because intuition isn't infallible. Experience can create blind spots just as easily as it creates insight—which is one reason I value having AI challenge mine.
But actually making the decision—and owning it?
That's still my job.