In this issue of The Practice, we look at how AI might reshape the structure of the legal profession and the delivery of legal services. It extends a conversation The Practice has been having since generative AI arrived in 2022, and it is also part of a larger conversation about technology and change in the profession—one The Practice has been covering since one of its earliest issues, published in 2015: “Disruptive Innovation in Legal Services.”
As context, in our first issue on AI and the law, in 2023, Suffolk Law dean Andrew Perlman made an early intervention on how ChatGPT would affect legal services and lawyers, collaborating with ChatGPT to generate predictions about how well AI could perform the basic tasks of a lawyer’s job. He offered examples of what were then serviceable wills, contracts, and complaints generated by ChatGPT. (No doubt this has since improved.) At the time, he concluded: “AI will not eliminate the need for lawyers, but it does portend the end of lawyering as we know it.” In the Speaker’s Corner for that issue, Jason Boehmig—then CEO of Ironclad and now head of OpenAI’s legal vertical—echoed Perlman: “AI is never going to replace lawyers, but lawyers who use AI and lawyers who use technology are absolutely going to replace lawyers who don’t.”
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The Implications of ChatGPT for Legal Services and Society
In July 2026, we again examined AI in the legal industry. Michele DeStefano, a professor of law at the University of Miami, documented the value human lawyers might have in an increasingly AI-dominated world. She landed on three things: character, client-centricity, and innovation. In this issue, the working assumption has been that every legal department, law-firm lawyer, and law student is either expected to use AI to increase efficiency or is already using it—sometimes without guardrails or guidance, and in some cases, despite outright bans.
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How Lawyers Can Add Value in the Age of AI
This issue picks up where those left off. AI has now infiltrated the profession so thoroughly that it could finally make inroads where previous technologies have failed (prognosticators have been predicting the death of the billable hour for at least twenty-five years). But as Richard Susskind notes in his conversation with David B. Wilkins in this issue’s Speaker’s Corner, “Right now, we’re in transition, but we don’t actually know what we’re in transition to.” That’s a difficult moment for everyone, and perhaps for lawyers especially, who love routine, stability, and predictability. To that end, this issue asks: if AI is going to reshape the structure of the legal profession, what do we want that new structure to be? What guardrails and governance rules should we have in place? How might a newer, better legal profession provide space for those who have traditionally struggled to access legal help? And finally, how does history help us make sense of this transition at all?
“Historians know many moments in the past when observers described feeling as though the sidewalk were speeding up underneath them. That’s very much the sensation of the present,” says Jo Guldi, a professor at Emory University, in an article that asks historians to help us make sense of this messy moment. Guldi has spent much of her career studying moments when people lost faith in institutions and pushed society forward, and she suggests that placing AI within the long arc of history can offer a balm to the doomsayers. She says: “In this moment of crisis, this is really where one needs the logic of a history of hope to say, this is not the first time people have faced a technology crisis or an information crisis. The bottom line is that we are constantly remaking our institutions.”
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