LO
Lawyer — tasks, one by one
The unit of analysis is the task, not the job title. Each one below carries its direction, whether the judgement rests on evidence or on platform inference, the reasoning, and what it does not establish.
Every task on this page#
Legal research
Being augmented✓ Evidence-backedFinding the authorities that govern a question, and the ones that cut the other way.
Retrieval over case law and statute has improved sharply and the first hour of research is now much shorter. It is augmentation rather than replacement because the reliability problem is asymmetric: a missed authority or an invented one has professional consequences that the lawyer, not the tool, bears, so every result still has to be read.
Research hours were how firms trained and billed juniors. Compressing them protects the partner's judgement while removing the apprenticeship that produced the next partner.
Drafting and negotiating documents
Being augmented✓ Evidence-backedTurning a deal or a position into text, then fighting over that text with the other side.
First drafts and redline summaries are now cheap, which compresses the junior hours a matter used to consume. Negotiation is a different activity: it is about knowing what the other side will concede, what your client actually cares about, and when to stop — reading people and positions rather than producing text.
Negotiation is a small share of the hours on most matters; drafting is a large one. Being protected on the former does not protect the leverage model that made the matter profitable.
Giving advice someone will act on
Still human-led✓ Evidence-backedTelling a client what to do given the law, the facts, the money and the risk they can stomach.
Advice is a regulated act with liability attached, and clients pay for someone to be accountable as much as for the answer. A tool can make the lawyer faster at forming the view; it cannot be the one whose name is on it, and in most jurisdictions is not permitted to be.
A licensing rule is a policy choice, and policy choices are argued about when the cost difference becomes large enough. Several jurisdictions are already consulting on what non-lawyers may do.
Advocacy and appearances
Still human-led≈ Platform inferenceStanding up in a room and persuading a judge, tribunal, regulator or counterparty in real time.
Courts control who may address them and have shown no appetite for changing that. Preparation is heavily assisted now; the appearance itself is not, and the rules of the forum are the constraint rather than the technology.
Appearances are a small fraction of most lawyers' time and are concentrated in litigation. For the transactional majority this task offers no protection at all.
Supervising machine-assisted work
New task✓ Evidence-backedDeciding what the tools may be used for, and signing for the output as if you had done it yourself.
Professional conduct rules in several jurisdictions now treat competence with technology as part of the duty of competence, and the sanction cases over fabricated citations made supervision an explicit obligation. This is new work that did not exist five years ago and it sits with the qualified person.
This is an added duty, not an added role — it arrives as unbilled responsibility on people who already had a full week. Nobody is hiring a supervisor of machine work; they are extending the existing duty of competence.