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Notes -
A couple contrary points:
at least in the U.S., the practice of law is an upper class guild. Anything that would threaten the prosperity of the guild too much will be reacted against in the same way the medieval guilds reacted against competition - i.e. harshly.
lawyers are disproportinately overrepresented in politics, and existing law gives the profession the right to govern itself and set its own standards. So regulatory or legally-mandated self-licking ice-cream cones which are well behind the technological curve are quite possible.
the portion of the bar which actually wields power (judges, politicians, senior lawfirm partners, etc.) are disproportionately old, small-c-conservative about process and procedure, and notoriously tech-averse. I can't find it right now but I recall a brief back-and-forth I had with @ymeskhout about the absolutely pitiful state of courtroom computerized document- and record-review technology. The long and short of it is, I would not expect the top echelons of the legal profession to be best placed to make good use of the tools AI offers.
not all portions of the legal field would be replaced well by AI. Contract drafting? Perhaps. Brief-writing? Also perhaps. But lawyers are also depended upon to manage interpersonal relationships (i.e. with regulatory agencies), negotiate, and advise clients about imaginative strategies and as to potential long-term consequences of various actions. While AI may may lawyers better at these tasks, I don't think LLMs as we currently see them can fully replace people. Also, lawyers are called-upon for record-keeping and compliance matters - as AI is shortly going to drastically reduce the cost of document generation, there's going to be a LOT more for lawyers to keep track of (assisted, of course, by other AIs).
Just my two cents - I'm also not that smart, so I could well be very wrong. But I don't have it in me to resign myself to the glue-factory just yet.
You won't find me disagreeing about the fact that its professions with well-cartelized guilds that can close ranks to protect their own that have a short term advantage against automation. Having literal politicians feeling favorably towards you can't hurt either.
It's for similar reasons that I think that US doctors have a better shot of doing the same than their meeker UK and Indian counterparts. After all, they already maintain their very high salaries by keeping us poor bastards away unless we jump through a great number of arbitrary loops. Can't blame them though, if that's the cost of making $250k median, I'd do it too.
More importantly, AI is absolutely a field in which you can't afford to simply plan ahead after looking at the current state of the field, GPT-5 and above will likely be just as good at atany cognitive task you throw at them, including planning and selling clients on speculative ideas.
At any rate, even if the top 1% of the profession clings on a little longer, it's no consolation to a poor bastard still in law school, he's never to going to make it to those stratified ranks before they pull the ladder up at escape velocity!
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I would think there would be a decrease in cost for legal services, since everything could be done more efficiently on the part of those who are lawyers, and so the supply curve would shift. At the same time, I'm not sure if this will result in a wage decrease on average, because the lawyers that exist should be able to do more, which might compensate.
I think the decrease in cost would increase the level of litigation that goes on, which would increase demands for lawyers in courts and for judges, which cannot be as easily automated. I'm not sure what the net effect of demand for lawyers would be.
I'm sure people with more experience in economics would have a more detailed perspective.
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I think the real issue will be severe downward pressure on wages, particularly among newly minted attorneys who are looking for jobs in-house or large firms.
That is, for most pursuits and purposes, GPT can do just about anything a first-year associate can do, and cheaper. Your 'bargaining position' as a new attorney is basically "if you spend tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours training me I MIGHT be able to produce work on par with this $500/month software subscription."
So law firms are likely to cut the budgets they would otherwise use to hire rafts of recently-graduated associates at extremely high salaries.
This will place a lot of pressure on law schools to bring their prices down, and it isn't clear they can do that without disrupting a lot of other aspects of academics. That is, many students go to undergrad SOLELY for the purpose of getting into Law School later. Law school is an 'artificially' capped field, and there are many other expenses (books, tutoring, test prep... adderall) that students will spend money on to get ahead.
Harder and harder to justify that if they can't expect to make at least middle class wages right out of school.
Many mid-late career attorneys will be able to get by on the strength of their reputation alone. Even if LawGPT is technically just as smart as they are, and just as if not more likely to return a 'correct' answer, a guy with 20 or so years of experience under his belt will command a certain gravitas and thus can render advice, opinions, and judgment that is accepted as authoritative on his say-so.
He probably won't feel the pinch of competition so much. Although I'm fully prepared to be wrong about that if the superiority of the AI is just that dominant.
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