Ep. 2 - AI anxiety, change & the future of the profession

In this episode, Aurelia and Chris tackle the growing anxiety around AI in the legal profession. 

As lawyers, product builders and founders of an AI-native legal service, they share their perspective on why lawyers shouldn't fear being replaced by AI, but rather should embrace the opportunities for more interesting and diverse career paths ahead.

The future of legal is bright. While AI will certainly change how legal work is done, it's more likely to enhance lawyers' capabilities and create new opportunities rather than replace them. 

The key is staying human, creative, and curious while being open to new ways of practising law.

• (00:00) - Intro & the TL;DR
• (01:10) - The impact of AI on legal jobs
• (03:26) - Evolving roles and skills for lawyers
• (10:03) - AI adoption real talk
• (15:04) - Trust in AI tools
• (18:38) - Human value in the age of AI
• (21:41) - Commoditisation of legal services
• (23:10) - What does AI native mean?
• (26:26) - Wrap up

Links:
- Watch on YouTube

Creators and Guests

Host

Aurelia Butler-Ball

Co-founder @ Tacit Legal

Host

Chris Bridges

Co-founder @ Tacit Legal

What is Too Legal; Didn't Read?

In this podcast, we talk about what is hot and what is not in legal tech, and our journey building one of the first AI-native legal services in the UK. Hosted by Tacit Legal co-founders, Aurelia Butler-Ball and Chris Bridges.

Aurelia: 00:00

Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode two of the podcast, Two Legal Didn't Read, with me Aurelia and Chris from Tacit Legal. In this podcast series, we navigate you through all of the main key issues in legal and legal tech from our perspectives as lawyers, product developers and law firm owners. Now, true to our name, we've actually recorded this intro at the end of our podcast so we could give you the hot takes, digestible information, the TLDR of our episode. Chris, what was it all about?

Chris: 00:36

Yeah, so in this episode we talked about the growing AI anxiety in Legal that we're seeing and hearing about every week, but we think a bit of anxiety is healthy. We think the future of the profession is bright and there's nothing to worry about. I think there is going to be change but we think it will create more jobs, not take away jobs, and we think those jobs will be more interesting. And then finally, you know, as long as we remain our human, creative and curious selves, we'll all be absolutely fine.

Aurelia: 01:05

Great TLDR. Now everyone, let's get stuck in. Chris, let's talk about it. I mean, have you felt that lots of people have been asking you about this issue? Yeah,

Chris: 01:20

for sure. I swear it's coming up weekly now and I'd be lying if I said I don't feel it as well sometimes. Yeah. I definitely have my weak moments where I I feel a bit nervous about it all. But no, I think I think the thing to say right at the top is our view is generally pretty positive.

Chris: 01:39

So if you've got any doubts, then this should be a good episode for you.

Aurelia: 01:43

Yeah, I think that's interesting, isn't it? We are in AI, and one of the drivers of leaving BigLaw ourselves and setting up Tacit Legal, which is considered an AI native law firm. We're kind of at the forefront of this really exciting movement and change in the industry, but even us are feeling really anxious and uncertain about the future ahead. So we can absolutely understand that our clients and colleagues in other firms are feeling it really acutely. So look, Chris, come on, let's start off.

Aurelia: 02:22

Is AI gonna have a negative impact on our legal jobs?

Chris: 02:27

Yeah, I mean, so everyone's opinion on negatives is different. I don't think on like a macro scale there's going be a negative impact at all. I think I reckon there's probably going to be a pretty net positive gain. But yeah, I think there's going to be an impact, but it's going to be more about the shape of teams, like the tasks you're doing, the skills you need. I definitely don't think we're going to be seeing any massive drop in the number of lawyers anytime soon, the number of jobs or anything like that.

Chris: 02:59

If anything, I actually suspect there may be more.

Aurelia: 03:01

So you don't think lawyers are going be replaced by AI just yet?

Chris: 03:05

No, no, I know Sam Altman and others would have us believe that AGI is around the corner but no, I just, yeah, I don't see it anytime soon and honestly the closer you are to it and the more you've used tools in real work, think the more you realise that's true. You know, there's some moments when you're like, God, this is incredible, but then there's also a lot of moments where you're like, Really? Yeah, so no, think we're safe for a while, yeah.

Aurelia: 03:36

Yeah and that is looking at the different types of jobs that lawyers do and I guess analysing which if any could be replaced by tech and there's been a lot of chat around those jobs at the beginning of a legal career could maybe the most heavily impacted. Do you think that's the case and for juniors and the tasks that they do that they might be the first to go?

Chris: 04:06

Yeah, so you get a few different variations of this coming up and you know from senior lawyers it tends to be, oh, how are we gonna train junior lawyers because we don't have the, you know, the simple work for them to do anymore? I just don't think that's the right question. You know, that makes a massive assumption that the tasks that we need junior lawyers to be doing tomorrow are the same as they were yesterday. And if you look at any like big change over the last like few decades, like the jobs that a junior lawyer was doing thirty years ago are very different to what they are doing now. So yeah, I think that that the whole question kind of yeah, is based on a false assumption.

Chris: 04:46

So yeah, those tasks that we traditionally think junior lawyers do and cut their teeth on, just don't think they're going to be tasks that we consider to be even human tasks in the future and there'll be other tasks that we do consider that are junior lawyer tasks, and they'll just be different ones. It's my second one.

Aurelia: 05:02

And I know in other pods that you've been on and on conference stages you've talked quite a lot about what kind of future skill set of a lawyer looks like. And so, is it really the skills of junior lawyers that law firms will be looking for are going to be slightly different because those tasks are going to be different in themselves that they might be doing going forward?

Chris: 05:29

Yeah, and I think there's two different angles to this. Like traditional lawyers, the traditional lawyers, like lawyers as they are today are always They going to may exist in different numbers, but you know for people that go down that path and they're kind of doing a role that looks fairly similar to what we're doing today, where it's hourly rate ish or, you know, quite artisan reinventing the wheel from scratch, maybe using some AI alongside, but effectively it's human driven. I think there's going to be certain skills that are just more important than they ever have been before because they're the ones that you kind of need from day one. You know, things like EQ and critical thinking and all that kind of stuff, which we've always said we want from trainees, but I just think they're going to be more important because that's going to be, you know, the bulk of the job. And I actually think good AI products are going to help people get to developing those skills quicker rather than waiting for their, you know, three, four years until they've earned their stripes enough to jump on a negotiation call.

Chris: 06:35

Yeah. People will be doing that kind of thing a lot earlier, which I think is a good thing, that's not bad thing.

Aurelia: 06:41

Well that's it, so if we really kind of lean into the human skills that make up a good lawyer, the judgment and the strategy and the empathy and that's what we want to nurture and encourage in our junior lawyers coming through. I mean is it quite a controversial thing to say that actually very, I don't know, one dimensional lawyers, just, you know, black letter law, not really having that broader skill set, those types of jobs could be under?

Chris: 07:17

Yeah, and again it's nothing new is it, you know, everyone's been saying for years and years and years and years like the things that matter, especially in kind of the B2B world or commercial awareness, like that's nothing new. It's just going to become more true. You know, those softer skills are just going be more and more important, and that's fine. And I don't think that necessarily means there's like less jobs for those people that don't have those skills. Think that's just slightly different jobs.

Chris: 07:45

So, you know, the second half of it is the people who aren't kind of doing the traditional practice, or a lot of people don't want to, myself included, I never really felt like I liked it, the opportunities people like me and, you know, people that don't want to go that way are just going to be so much bigger. Know, there's a whole another side of legal practice that I think we're yet to see and that's like lawyers who are both lawyers and knowledge engineers, lawyers and data engineers, lawyers and business improvement people, all of those kind of roles I just think there's going to become kind of a bit of a mash up. That's not to say every lawyer is going to need all of those skills but the people who do naturally lean to those skills I think will be incredible lawyers, whereas in the years gone by maybe they're shopped aside a little bit, you know, whole lawyers versus non lawyers and yeah, I just think that kind of culture is going to die away and people who are kind of multi skilled are going to thrive.

Aurelia: 08:52

That's a really exciting opportunity I think to kind of broaden the definition of what a lawyer is and actually having the skills which embed you in other parts of the business if perhaps you're working in house and having that kind of cross industry knowledge, I think that's incredibly exciting for the industry. I think another

Chris: 09:12

One of the weird biggest risks I think is actually the people who are most commercially aware and the people who make the best lawyers, like in the traditional sense, do tend to be the people who are kind of interested in other stuff as well. Yeah. So I mean that's going be an interesting thing, know, is the top talent going to go left or right? So you could see a complete shift potentially. Yeah.

Chris: 09:37

But you know, don't think that's a controversial thing to say at all, know. Know our colleague Dan, he's like, he was a brilliant IT person and systems integrator before he was a lawyer and now he's probably one of the best IT lawyers in the country. It's just, yeah, but you know people like him may not have made that choice ten years ago, sorry, now ten years ago. Yeah,

Aurelia: 10:01

that's so true. It's great perspective and I think another massive anxiety which we're hearing across, across the industry but actually in our building and providing Tilda to in house teams, we've had the opportunity to speak to loads of GCs and others in house legal teams. And we're often hearing that there is this anxiety of them feeling left behind, that everyone else is using AI tools and they're just there, they don't know how to integrate them or implement them. They don't know which is gonna benefit them. How much do you think AI tools are being used across the industry?

Chris: 10:49

I mean it depends if you go on your LinkedIn feed or not. No I think it's true, like if you go on, if you look on LinkedIn you'll come away believing that every single person other than you is using AI extensively and that's just not true. I mean we talk to in house teams all the time. I'd say one in ten has actually had a successful experience with AI beyond like using it in their personal life. I think loads of people are using it in their personal life but actually very, very, very few are using it in their work.

Chris: 11:22

Yeah, LinkedIn would leave you to believe otherwise but yeah, I think adoption is still very, very low. I think that would change a lot in the next couple of years but yeah, if you're not using it yet and you're not that far off using it, you're probably ahead of the crowd, not behind it.

Aurelia: 11:36

Yeah, I think that's got to be reassuring for everyone and even those teams who have adopted it and they are being used still feel very much that they're in the kind of development stage of them, they're not properly seeing the full gains yet and they're just still crossing their fingers that they'll come.

Chris: 11:55

Yeah and actually I think there's a big difference between in house and private practice here and traditionally you might have thought that in house legal would be behind private practice and things like document management, matter management, all that kind of stuff. Generally private practice has been really far ahead. I actually think that shifted with AI. I think, in house teams are using it more effectively, and by more effectively I mean on targeted use cases. It's like actually if you speak to people in private practice and in Big Law at the moment then there aren't that many targeted use cases like genuinely productionised.

Chris: 12:32

You know there's a lot of people that have bought like Legora or Harvey or you know another AI platform, but effectively it's a legal wrapper with some you know more legal tooling around like a more like a chat GPT or Claude experience. That's oversimplifying it. There are other features to those tools but but they are they're like an assistant. They're like a sounding board. They're not they're not like an integrated AI process like you you might have with, like, ContractView, for instance.

Chris: 13:05

So, yeah, I suspect in house actually is probably starting to pull slightly ahead in terms of like actual targeted use cases beyond chat.

Aurelia: 13:13

That's really cool isn't it?

Chris: 13:15

Yeah.

Aurelia: 13:16

I guess also what really compounds that anxiety that lawyers both in house and in private practice are feeling about being left behind is the pressure that they might be feeling from management saying, come on. We hear that AI is going to make some huge gains for you lawyers like let's get it in, let's you know let's start using it as quickly as possible, but that's quite a scary position for them to be in if they don't really know where to turn.

Chris: 13:45

It's yeah, it's scary and I it's also I don't think massively true, maybe it is true but not on the timescales that people are expecting it. So I think this all stemmed from a Deloitte study that came out a few years ago now, maybe two years ago. It was like the impact of gen AR in different job categories and they said legal was going to be like right up there at the top. And that is probably true, like at some point in the next ten years legal will be massively impacted, but it's not yet. But yeah, I think that's kind of unhelpful in industry and in house because, you know, you've got GCs being told by CFO, COO, CEO, oh well Deloitte are telling us that legal should be driving the most change here but your adoption rate's way lower than everyone else, what's going on?' Yeah, it's not very helpful.

Chris: 14:38

I think right now, like, legal is rightly behind, like, there's quite complicated and accuracy sensitive workflows that are going on. You know, it's right that we're a bit nervous about going full hog like you might in other business areas, so yeah, I don't think people should feel too stressed out by

Aurelia: 15:04

That, I mean at the top of the episode we were talking about the kind of natural characteristics of a lawyer wanting control and certainty and you know that's kind of what we're here for and to deliver and so that nervousness around using AI tools which those teams that we've spoken to who have not had a great experience, it usually is around a bit of the reliability. How can I be sure that this is right, what the tool is doing? That kind of trust gap is fueling a lot of anxiety. These tools still need quite a lot of human oversight.

Chris: 15:49

Yeah, no, and definitely I think a lot of people feel like they're using it wrong because they're hearing everyone else saying how good it is and then they go on and they're like, what? It didn't do that great a job. But I I think the thing is, like, it can do a really good job, but the amount of effort that you have to put in into your playbooks to make them work better, it's got and that's kind of a continuous process. Like, you have to go back and, you know, where it gets it wrong and prove your playbook, add some extra guidance. That's a very time intensive process and until you've done that you're not gonna see that much, like you're not gonna see a really high accuracy rate.

Chris: 16:27

So yeah, and then I think when, say if they've got to do all of that, if in house teams have to do all of that right at the start, I mean one, that's a massive hurdle to entry, but two, if they don't do that and they see bad accuracy, a busy in house lawyer, even a practice lawyer, any person, if you're busy and you're starting to get really bad results, you're just going to lose faith in it really quickly and go, well, that's not saving me any time, it just caused me more frustration, and you end up throwing it in the bin. So I think it's just one of those things where like you have to be prepared for how much effort you have to put in at the outset and continuously to improve it. It's not just, you know, plug and play, off you go.

Aurelia: 17:10

Yeah, and that's where you get the adoption issue and I know with Tilda, I mean we work mostly with in house teams who don't have playbooks, know, haven't been able to provide all the knowledge for these tools to really work as well as they can do and I'll always kind of check the output to give them to give that comfort and surety that the outputs right. But yeah, I guess, what we're saying is basically if the in house team is always left to do that, well that's kind of half the job isn't it really? They're still doing quite a lot of the job, yeah, it's not taking off their table.

Chris: 17:53

They're probably still doing half the job, you know, maybe best case 40% of the job day in, day out, but then there's still the bit on top, the kind of management, additional management layer at the end then have of, you know, who's updating the playbooks, who's who's making sure that where it's getting it wrong, that's being fed back into the playbooks. All of that kind of stuff, like, that's an additional layer on top. So whilst best case, you may maybe you're gaining 60%, you're probably losing a little bit at the top to kind of manage it all, which I think a lot people don't take into account. And I think that's probably why a lot of kind of pure AI tool implementation projects fail. Interesting.

Aurelia: 18:38

So then looking at AI and often we hear, I mean especially those in private practice, those lawyers terrified about how much AI could potentially erode the margin on legal fees, maybe pressure from clients saying well I just assume you're using loads of AI now so you know where does that leave the billable hour, why are you charging me x to do this job? And so we kind of bring into question really the value of legal work something that was always based on time, not quite the right metric, what do you think?

Chris: 19:17

So there's lots of economic theory that goes behind all of us, which I'm not going to go into.

Aurelia: 19:23

Come on, you'd love to, you'd love to go into it.

Chris: 19:25

Everyone will turn the podcast off

Aurelia: 19:27

very quickly.

Chris: 19:29

But, so I think this massively depends on like what segment of the market you're looking at. So I think if your clients are like founders or, you know, early stage businesses, you're naturally going to have more of a problem here because they are going to be adopting Gen AI tools left, right and center. No governance. Don't need it. They don't need the governance quite rightly.

Chris: 19:53

They're going to be asking chat GBC legal questions before they come to a lawyer. They will. That said, I think there's a bit of an education piece and I think probably over the next year or two we'll probably see people starting to get bitten by doing that because, you know, okay, maybe it will get a right answer, but a lot of legal work is about asking the right questions, not necessarily just about the answer, if that makes sense. So people are doing that, they're not necessarily asking the right questions and then possibly leaving 90% of the risk completely unaddressed. But yeah, I think more broadly than that, like kind of more in our space, I don't know.

Chris: 20:36

I think there's I think most lawyers are understanding of the fact that we're quite far and unless it's a very targeted use case, like like Tilda for contract review, where we've invested quite a lot in in developing a product around it. But for like more ad hoc legal work, think most lawyers, in house lawyers, perhaps, are pragmatic about the fact that, you know, having chap GPT equivalent, maybe a more legal equivalent, isn't going to save you loads of time. No. And it's definitely not measurable, so I don't think don't think we're gonna see that pressure on, you know, the complicated work that in house lawyers like coming to private practice lawyers for anytime soon. I think I think there's another end of the market, which is the more commoditisable end of the market where we're trying to plug the gap of tilde like contract review where where, yeah, quite rightly, I think clients are starting to get a bit bit more.

Aurelia: 21:41

And alongside contract review, what other areas do you think are ripe for commoditisation?

Chris: 21:50

Yeah, so I think this is quite difficult in that you've got to think about services that could be provide. If you're talking about trooper monetization, it's gotta be a service that is in its own right. You know, you can't do like half a bit of employment advice or half a bit of data protection advice. It's just there's only like, you know, you might be automated part of it if you actually still need the human wrapper around it, so it's not that productizable. But say, mean other things like Garfield AI is brilliant example of something great, you know, deck claims, super specific, you can automate pretty much the whole lens when thing.

Chris: 22:30

Yes, there's potentially a load of work that you could put around that, but that is a discrete bit of value or a discrete outcome, so you can productise that. I think there's bits of like bigger services that can be like disaggregated, so I mean the obvious things like that we've started to see over the last five years anyway, corporate due diligence, litigation discovery, all of that kind of stuff, the really repeatable stuff, and that's where people I think are going to start digging holes in bills from their private practice lawyers, it's like well if you're still doing this with you know paralegals in the basement, what are doing?

Aurelia: 23:08

Yeah, why are doing? And I think that like the makeup of a law firm is going to change and I think that's something which we had on our horizon when we left BigLaw and set up Tassic Legal, basically redesigning what a law firm should look like and thankfully that's now called an AI native law firm but just in respect of that, tell what does an AI native law firm mean? When people use that term, what are they talking about?

Chris: 23:44

Yeah, so there's actually very different examples of this. Like if so I mean the three that everyone are citing now is us, which is quite Us, Garfield AI and Crosby, and the other three that mainly come to mind at the moment. There's a few there's another couple that are like in the fun space that are popping up. But, yeah, if you if you take those three, they're all quite different. So I believe Crosby is taking more of a very different approach to us.

Chris: 24:17

So they are effectively providing the same service, human service, but then optimizing it as they go. So it's more like an operating model improvement program. So, okay, we do a job for someone. Oh, now we identify that we could do that bit, that job quicker, better with AI or automation. Use develop, bring down a little bit and develop that bit.

Chris: 24:38

And then it's like a continuous improvement process. And that is, I think, that's AI native, like, you're you're kind of starting you go, right. Well, actually, we've got the opportunity to redesign this from scratch. That's kind of it's very on it and do it that way. I think Garfield AI and us are probably on the other end where it's more like productized.

Chris: 24:59

So it's it's not we're gonna do the same job and find a way of improving it. It's like we are gonna completely rethink the way that job is done and productize it. So it's a lot more narrow. The scope is a lot narrower and it's all about, you know, designing that service blank sheet of paper from scratch to be efficient with AI. So it's two, I think both of them are AI native but I think it's two quite different approaches.

Aurelia: 25:31

Yeah and I think our approach, we took that because we understood loads of what we do as lawyers just doesn't lend itself to being optimised by AI, not yet anyway.

Chris: 25:48

No, and there's also like a, there's a danger of doing that in that, you know, by trying to automate the way that people do it, you're actually missing an opportunity because, you know, if you actually just start with a blank sheet of paper, don't make any assumptions about it having to be done the same way a human would do it, you've got a much bigger opportunity potentially. Just because a human does it one way doesn't mean that's the right way to do it and actually maybe there's a better way of doing it with machine.

Aurelia: 26:20

We're coming to the end of our second part Chris, time flies. We're having loads of fun. So look, how do we wrap this up for lawyers? How do we help them dial down on the anxiety of AI and I don't know I guess kind of all walk hand in hand on this kind of crazy journey ahead of us. I guess what is it?

Aurelia: 26:52

So just be rest assured that AI isn't going to come for your job but it might, but it definitely wants to be integrated in it in the right way.

Chris: 27:04

Yeah and I think it's like don't let the fear dominate, you know, yes it's a healthy amount of fear is, sorry, a certain amount of fear is healthy, you've just got to recognise the opportunity and you know what I often think like a lot of lawyers didn't end up being lawyers because they like the law. They went into it because they're interested in IT or media or whatever. If anything AI is an opportunity to like go back to that those roots a bit and but I think you get three, five, ten years into the new profession and there's like a sunk cost fallacy of you know I went all those years through law school to be a lawyer and I must draft and I must negotiate and I must but that's doesn't that's not necessarily why you enter the profession in the first place and I think people should remind themselves of that because it may actually be that it opens up a job that is more interesting than the one they're in.

Aurelia: 28:00

Yeah, I think that's it and for years as lawyers have always known that sector experience and working in industries with clients that we're interested in gives us the edge and that's always going to continue and as long as we're our most human and creative cure ourselves then I don't think we've got anything to worry about.

Chris: 28:23

Right, that's a great note to end it on.

Aurelia: 28:26

Thanks Chris, thanks for Ep two, see you See

Chris: 28:30

you in a bit.

Aurelia: 28:30

Bye.