The Evolving Role of Lawyers
AI won”t replace lawyers; it will make the best ones indispensable. Tasks once seen as painstaking—drafting agreements, reviewing contracts, or summarizing case law—are tailor-made for the raw processing power of language models. But the rise of “digital associates” to perform these tasks does not mean lawyers are on a path to obsolescence.
Quite the opposite: as AI handles more operational work, the higher-value role of lawyers—providing strategic and ethical counsel—will become even more critical. The lawyers who thrive in this new era will be those who can translate complex legal frameworks into business strategy, act as ethical guardians, and deliver human judgment in an increasingly algorithm-driven world.
Lawyers as Ethical Control
The best business lawyers have already evolved beyond the stereotype of the “department of no.” Instead of serving as gatekeepers, they act as strategic partners who align legal risk with business goals. However, the role continues to expand—toward something even more consequential: applying a public policy lens to business decisions.
Public policy exists to represent those who are not part of corporate decision-making. Laws and regulations across areas like privacy, consumer protection, and environmental impact exist to prevent companies from pushing risks onto the public—what economists call “externalities.” Because lawyers are tasked with interpreting and applying those policies, they are uniquely positioned to represent the public’s interests within corporate deliberations.
This responsibility grows as AI accelerates decision-making and reduces human friction. Faster decisions carry greater potential to frustrate regulators, communities, and customers if risks are overlooked. Legal leaders must ensure that speed does not come at the expense of responsibility.
What AI Changes—And Doesn’t—in Legal Work
AI, particularly as it advances toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), already excels at many traditional legal tasks: synthesizing precedent and drafting documents.
But there are limits to the advance of AI models. They cannot balance business performance against regulatory concerns. Neither do they possess an independent ethical framework. At best, AI models can simulate ethics through rules and heuristics designed by humans. Even then, its “morality” is borrowed rather than lived. Recent incidents show that even the most advanced AI models can make ethically troubling errors.
As AI models evolve, the business world is finally coming to terms with Isaac Asimov’s prediction: “You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates.” Asimov’s warning resonates today: logic without judgment can justify anything. If businesses allow their deployments of AI to optimize for efficiency while ignoring fairness, regulators and consumers are unlikely to be forgiving.
Smarter Lawyers for the AI Era
The next generation of lawyers will not compete with machines on speed or efficiency. Their value will lie in adding judgment to AI-generated work. That means:
- Contextualizing outputs: integrating AI-synthesized analyses into nuanced, company-specific advice.
- Applying judgment at speed: accelerating decisions with AI-driven outputs but without sacrificing ethical deliberation.
- Navigating AI-driven risks: addressing novel risks in privacy, intellectual property, discrimination, compliance, and—most likely—areas that we can’t even yet discern.
In this environment, “judgment at speed” becomes the defining skill—the ability to marry rapid analysis with principled decision-making in real time. As companies embed AI into their strategies, legal teams will serve as guides for its rapid, but responsible, deployment.
Their task will be not only to prevent illegal behavior but to help their clients avoid short-term wins that risk creating long-term backlash. Companies that deploy AI-powered tools without safeguards against bias may gain efficiencies in the near-term, but will almost spur lawsuits, regulatory intervention, and reputational damage down the road. By contrast, lawyers who integrate the public lens into their counseling can steer their clients toward ethical practices that ultimately enable long-term success. In this way, lawyers become not only guardians of compliance but also strategic enablers of competitive advantage.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
The risks of relying on AI without strong legal oversight are already clear. Compliance failures (even including false claims of AI usage) can trigger meaningful, even eight-figure, fines. PR crises can destroy consumer trust overnight. Regulators are signaling that companies will be held to higher standards in an AI-driven economy, where mistakes made by machines will not be excused as accidents but as irresponsible stewardship of power. The costs of getting the ethics of AI wrong, both financially and reputationally, will far outweigh the savings from cutting corners.
Closing Call-to-Action
AI will not replace lawyers any more than calculators replaced accountants. Instead, it will elevate the importance of those who can harness its efficiencies with strategic foresight and ethical leadership.
For business leaders, the takeaway is clear: engage your counsel as a regulatory “red team” to test your business’s AI strategy. For lawyers, the takeaway is equally clear: embrace that role as an opportunity to guide, not block, business imperatives.
The companies that thrive will be those that embed their legal leaders across their operations, ensuring that speed never outpaces judgment. Those who don’t will discover that the real cost of AI missteps is not just fines and embarrassment, but the loss of customer trust, investor confidence, and long-term competitiveness.
In an era where machines move faster than ever before, the defining advantage will belong to organizations that pair technological power with human judgment—at speed.
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Members of the editorial and news staff of Law&Crime were not involved in the creation of this content.
