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Right now the churn is more in recent grads leaving for what they perceive to be greener pastures. The problem right now isn't so much a shortage of lawyers as it is a shortage of experienced lawyers. I work at a smaller firm, and just a couple months ago a younger guy who clerked for a judge after law school and whose wife works across the street from us quit to take a different job. I don't even know if the pay is any better, but it seems like everyone under the age of 35, and several people who are older, think that whatever job they're doing is unsatisfying and wants to do something closer to what they imagined the practice of law would look like. In the meantime, we can't find anyone to replace these people. Hiring out of law school only makes the situation worse because it takes several months to get an attorney to the point where they're actually making money for the firm, and they're unwilling to do that for a guy who is going to bolt in six months.
How is AI upending the profession in your case? Are there interesting avenues undergrads can pursue that have an opportunity to reinvigorate the profession in some sense? Or is it all fairly mundane?
I'm an atypical case, since I work at a non-profit and I spend a lot of time researching case law (I'm told by a lot of private practice friends that they haven't typed a casr citation into westlaw or lexis in years), but Westlaw's built-in AI has largely replaced summer associates as my go to source of info for "hmm, I wonder" type questions. Simple queries where I just want a quick sniff test to see if the theory I'm spitballing is precluded by some obvious bit of black letter law, or a short summary of how a particular jurisdiction handles some procedural issue. I get an answer of questionable veracity I'll need to verify and develop before getting any value out of, but the AI gives it to me in 45 seconds rather than 3-4 days. So I have to make a conscious effort to inefficiently include interns and new attorneys in things for training purposes, because it probably takes about a year before a new lawyer outperforms the AI (at current AI capabilities). We're not hiring fewer of them yet, since the higher-ups are mindful of maintaining the talent pipeline and don't want to be scrambling to find mid-levels in five years, but they do have less to do.
I'm adamant about never using AI for drafting assistance, but I notice my colleagues increasingly using it to generate first drafts of things like emails and op-eds. Haven't seen any open use of it on actual legal documents yet.
As far as labor force impact, I think it's very practice-area-dependent. The more your practice involves spreadsheets and insurance paperwork, volume-dependent mad libs-type work, the more impact you'll feel. If you're heavily reliant on tech companies or other clients making "AI first" pushes, it's probably pretty rough. I worry for our legal secretaries. Litigators are pretty safe. As long as judges require flesh and blood people standing in court rooms (or at least on zoom) and continue to ban the unauthorized practice of law, there's only so much automation that can really take place. Doctors and lawyers have spent over a century erecting walls and moats to protect their professions from competition from the dirty proles; we're not submitting to the robots without a fight.
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I haven't used AI for work and I don't know of anyone who does. I honestly don't know what I would even use it for. I guess I could theoretically load deposition transcripts in case I needed to see if there was one taken in the past where a witness said something I could use, but that would literally require millions of tokens of input context, assuming it was even capable of handling such a request, and the utility of that would be limited, i.e. I'd do it if it were cheap enough but there's no way it would be cheap enough. People bring up research a lot and it might be useful there, but I do research like twice a year.
Not saying it would or wouldn't work well for this, but even Opus 4.6 is $5 per million input tokens. You probably wouldn't want to feed in all the transcripts at once though.
Well, that's the problem, since it's only worth doing if I can feed in all the transcripts at once. If I knew which transcripts I needed, I wouldn't need an LLM to tell me! We're talking literally tens of thousands of transcripts here, most of them well over 100 pages. If I have to curate them to fit inside a reasonable context window, then I've already done 99% of the work, since it only takes a few minutes for me to look in the index and see if there's any relevant testimony. Even by my conservative calculations, at $5/token it would be prohibitively expensive to do anything, even if a large enough context window existed, and with that much context the LLM's accuracy would start to break down pretty quickly.
You can simply feed them in batches instead of all at once. It's not a question of curation.
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I agree with this overall, and I don't even know where new grads are necessarily going. I know of urban DA/PD offices that have trouble hiring, and the pay/benefits are decent. Doing a few years at either to get some trial/motion/evidentiary hearing experience before moving on is apparently something new grads are not willing to do. The PD offices I'm most familiar with seem to be trading their experienced attorneys every few years but there really aren't that many new faces coming up the ranks.
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