Hans A. Böck / @LP_Hans
When I first wrote this piece back in 2015, even the title was a quiet homage to Richard Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers, a book that hovered over almost every serious conversation about the future of the legal profession at the time.
Back then, discussions about artificial intelligence, automation and new models of legal service delivery still carried a distinctly futuristic quality. They belonged to conferences, innovation panels and legal technology forums, comfortably removed from the daily reality of most law firms.
In that original article there was a lawyer called Teodoro. He worked from home somewhere outside the city, speaking to a small green figure sitting on his desk. He asked it to analyse mergers, identify specialists and map regulatory risks while preparing complex corporate transactions.
In 2015, that still felt speculative.
Today, what feels strange is not the technology itself, but how quickly it has become entirely ordinary.
Teodoro still works from home, although the small green figure has long since disappeared. These days he simply asks things out loud while reviewing notes on a transaction or walking to the kitchen for another coffee, much in the same way he once spoke to junior associates or members of his team.
“I need a complete regulatory risk map of the transaction. Compare it with the last European mergers challenged on competition grounds and check whether any of the economic experts have shifted their doctrinal position in the past two years.”
The answer takes only seconds.
Teodoro barely looks at the screen anymore while the system cross-references regulatory decisions, academic commentary and economic reports from across Europe. He has been working like this for long enough not to find it remarkable anymore, and perhaps that is one of the most unsettling things about this decade: the extraordinary normality of it all.
Ten years ago I imagined something vaguely similar. In hindsight, I suspect I underestimated it, because the real transformation is not that artificial intelligence helps lawyers work faster; it is that it has started to alter, quietly but profoundly, the economic, cultural and human structure upon which much of modern legal practice was built.
Teodoro had been using legal technology long before the term LegalTech became fashionable enough to appear at every conference in the sector.
First came document management systems, then collaborative platforms, workflow automation, knowledge management tools and, above all, the Cloud. It sounds almost absurd now, but there were entire law firms genuinely alarmed by the idea of storing confidential documents outside their own physical servers. For months, perhaps years, legal technology debates revolved around a strangely existential question: where exactly did the data sleep at night?
Eventually all of that became normal, as technological shifts almost always do.
Then came a succession of platforms and tools promising to transform legal practice while lawyers continued, more or less, to work exactly as they always had. Screens changed, filing cabinets disappeared, videoconferencing replaced endless travel and certain processes became faster and more efficient, but the underlying structure of the profession remained remarkably intact, together with the same hierarchies, the same pyramidal structures, the same exhausting nights and the same economic model built around vast quantities of specialised human time.
And perhaps that is where the great confusion still lies, because for years many lawyers assumed artificial intelligence would simply become another layer of legal technology: a more sophisticated tool, a better search engine or a slightly more advanced form of automation. This time, however, technology was not merely assisting legal work; it was entering the intellectual core of the profession itself.
For decades, the legal industry was built around one very specific raw material: specialised human time.
Not simply legal knowledge, but the limited capacity of trained professionals to read, interpret, compare, draft and detect risks within quantities of information that most organisations could never realistically process alone. That is why large law firms grew the way they did.
Entire floors were filled with junior lawyers reviewing contracts deep into the night beneath aggressive air conditioning, surviving on takeaway food, caffeine and exhaustion while screens continued to fill with tracked changes, redlined clauses and “final versions” that never seemed entirely final.
Those nights were never just about producing legal work; they were also producing lawyers.
The endless hours, the pressure, the availability and the ability to continue functioning while exhausted formed part of an informal but highly effective selection mechanism through which firms decided who progressed and who quietly disappeared. Five years as a junior associate, ten more as an associate, perhaps a few additional years as counsel and, if everything aligned correctly, eventual admission into an increasingly narrow partnership structure all depended on a system that converted endurance into professional legitimacy.
There were even rituals of survival: cigarette breaks during endless due diligence exercises, small groups gathering outside buildings at three in the morning while someone upstairs reopened a data room for the fourth time that night, and the dark humour that only emerges when highly educated people become collectively sleep deprived.
Yet those floors were not only generating future partners; they were generating billable hours, thousands and thousands of them, and perhaps that is where one of the deepest shocks of this transformation really sits. A substantial part of the economic structure of large corporate law firms depended on the ability to convert enormous quantities of specialised human time into billable work that clients were willing to absorb. Artificial intelligence is not simply automating repetitive tasks; it is making certain hours, certain teams and, in some cases, entire organisational structures increasingly difficult to justify.
Something fundamental has started to shift, even if many institutions still appear perfectly stable while their foundations move quietly underneath them.
A few months ago I met Alberto again.
In the original article, Alberto was preparing a criminal case with the assistance of a small legal system capable of analysing previous judgments, mapping judicial tendencies and identifying relevant background information in minutes.
Today Alberto rarely talks about technology. He talks about fatigue.
He says the law now produces more information than any individual human being can reasonably process unaided. New regulations, new judgments, new compliance obligations, new regulatory interpretations and new layers of complexity appear continuously and at increasing speed. The problem used to be access to knowledge; now the problem is surviving the sheer volume of it.
Perhaps that is why artificial intelligence entered the legal sector with such extraordinary speed. Not because lawyers suddenly became innovative — the profession remains deeply conservative in many ways — but because complexity eventually exceeded the natural processing capacity of human organisations. When that happens, systems tend to reorganise themselves whether professions are ready for it or not.
For years we assumed intellectual work would remain relatively protected from automation. Machines would replace physical labour, repetitive tasks and industrial processes, but not complex reasoning, legal interpretation or sophisticated analytical work.
Today, generative systems are capable of producing work that only a few years ago would have required entire teams of junior lawyers working through the night.
Of course the systems still make mistakes, sometimes spectacular ones, but that is no longer the most important point. The psychological barrier has already collapsed and, once an organisation understands that it can multiply the cognitive capacity of its teams exponentially, the conversation stops being technological and becomes economic before eventually turning strategic. Markets rarely transform themselves for cultural reasons alone; they usually change when the underlying economics become impossible to ignore.
Gerardo probably understood that earlier than many law firms did.
I always liked that character because he was the least traditionally “lawyer-like” of them all. While others were still thinking in terms of cases, filings and procedures, Gerardo was already thinking in systems.
Back in 2015 I imagined him as the General Counsel of a multinational insurance company, coordinating hybrid teams, automating parts of the contracting process and evaluating external law firms not only by legal prestige, but by operational sophistication, technological integration and efficiency. At the time, some people considered that vision vaguely dystopian; today it feels almost conservative.
Clients themselves have changed. For decades, much of the value offered by large law firms rested on privileged access to sophisticated legal expertise and vast quantities of specialised human time. Increasingly, clients are buying something different: speed, predictability, integration and systems capable of reducing uncertainty without adding friction to organisations already overwhelmed by complexity, a shift that forces many law firms to become something they never historically needed to be — highly sophisticated operational organisations.
Curiously, while parts of the traditional legal industry are beginning to feel the ground shifting beneath them, smaller specialist firms are living through one of the most interesting moments in decades.
Ricardo never wanted to work for a large corporate law firm and, truthfully, he never cared much for corporate law in the first place. While many of his contemporaries competed aggressively for positions in international firms dreaming of billion-pound transactions, Ricardo preferred spending hours discussing public procurement, administrative concessions and energy regulation with Alberto, a university friend equally obsessed with areas of law that almost nobody else considered remotely glamorous.
For years, most of their peers thought they were making a terrible mistake.
Fifteen years later, they are still working together.
Ricardo drives a hybrid Porsche considerably more expensive than it first appears, while Alberto recently bought a house on the Portuguese coast where he now works several days a week overlooking the Atlantic.
They still employ only three associates, but they also run several artificial intelligence systems continuously across legislation, procurement processes, regulatory monitoring and administrative case law. Ricardo sometimes jokes that he no longer knows whether he manages a law firm or a small operational intelligence centre, and he is probably not wrong.
Only a few years ago, much of the work they now complete in hours would have required larger teams, more infrastructure, more junior lawyers and levels of investment that would have been impossible for a boutique practice. They now compete for matters that would once have been entirely inaccessible to them, not necessarily because they understand the law better than large firms, but because one of the great historical advantages of scale has suddenly started to compress.
And perhaps that is one of the least expected consequences of this transformation: artificial intelligence is not only concentrating power; in some areas, it is quietly redistributing it as well.
People occasionally ask whether I believe lawyers will disappear.
The question itself is wrong.
Lawyers are not disappearing, but a significant part of the work upon which the economic structure of the legal profession was built is already beginning to disappear in front of us, and that changes far more than we are perhaps comfortable admitting.
Those endless due diligence nights were never only producing documents; they were also producing professional culture, hierarchies, learning structures, power relationships and entire career models built around endurance, availability and controlled exhaustion. Once part of the work feeding that system disappears, the system itself inevitably begins to lose definition.
Perhaps that is why there is such unease across the profession today. Most people already sense that something structural is changing, even if nobody can yet fully describe what the final shape will look like.
Meanwhile, the future continues advancing with deeply unsettling normality.
Teodoro no longer needs an office. Alberto can no longer read everything he is supposed to read. Gerardo no longer buys legal hours; he buys systems capable of reducing uncertainty. And Ricardo, the lawyer who never wanted to practise corporate law, now competes from a small specialist boutique with structures that once seemed completely unreachable.
Somewhere along the way, the future stopped looking futuristic.
And perhaps in another ten years we will look back at this moment with exactly the same mixture of fascination and disbelief with which I now reread that article from 2015, once again realising that we were still being conservative.
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