The future of law is not under threat
Triona Buckley, chief product officer at Actionstep, explores how AI is influencing the legal sector’s direction and what it takes for the technology to be truly helpful
The future of law isn’t under threat. But it is being reshaped, and how your law firm responds to that reshaping will define your next decade.
There’s a persistent narrative in legal circles that AI poses an existential threat to the profession. That lawyers will be replaced, firms will become obsolete, and much of what we recognise as legal work today will simply disappear. It’s an understandable concern. The capabilities of AI tools for legal drafting, review, and research are genuinely impressive and improving rapidly. Much of the production-level work of law has been commoditised.
But commoditisation isn’t the same as obsolescence. Law is one of the oldest professions in the world. It has adapted through industrial revolutions, globalisation and fundamental shifts in how business operates. Each time, the nature of legal work has evolved. The need for legal expertise has not.
The shift that matters most
The current wave of AI is focused heavily on the practice of law. That equates to drafting, e-discovery, summarisation, and document review. These tools are impressive, but they’re also becoming widely available and increasingly undifferentiated. Foundation AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI are already matching the capabilities of many specialist legal AI tools in their own technology.
The more important shift is happening in the business of law: how firms manage work across matters, allocate resources, intake new clients, maintain compliance, get paid, and understand their own performance. This is where most firms have historically struggled, relying on systems and processes that couldn’t keep pace with the complexity of their work.
AI applied to the business of law doesn’t replace expertise. It creates the right conditions for expertise to be applied more effectively, more consistently, and at scale.
When AI creates friction instead of removing it
There’s a real risk in how many firms are currently responding to AI. If the focus stays too narrow on task-level efficiency, your firm can end up creating more outputs without improving outcomes. Faster drafts lead to more documents. More documents lead to more review. More review creates pressure on the people whose judgement matters most.
The bottleneck doesn’t disappear. It moves upstream to more expensive resources. Without the right infrastructure around it, AI can introduce as much friction as it removes. The focus needs to shift from speed to systems.
For AI to be genuinely useful in legal practice, it needs to operate within the structure of the firm. It needs the context and understanding of the matter, the client, and the history. It needs control in the form of clear workflows, responsibilities, and approval points. And it needs governance including auditability, compliance, and trust. These aren’t optional.
Why mid-size firms are best placed to benefit
Mid-size firms are in a strong position to take advantage of this transition. They have enough scale to benefit from operational improvements, but without the institutional complexity or inertia that larger firms carry. They do complex, high-value work while maintaining close client relationships.
Because mid-size firms run leaner on junior associates, senior resources benefit disproportionately when AI takes on routine tasks. Expert judgement gets applied where it matters, rather than being diluted across administrative burden.
AI has the potential to remove many of the structural disadvantages mid-size firms have historically faced around administrative overhead, limited tech budgets, and access to business insight, without changing what makes them genuinely competitive. They don’t lose close client relationships, expert judgement and the ability to deliver a high standard of service.
The talent pipeline question
One overlooked dimension of this shift is the impact on people. There’s valid concern that AI will reduce the need for junior lawyers, and that the pipeline of future partners and experts could run dry within a generation.
The answer lies in using AI to improve how your firm trains and develops its people. Junior lawyers have traditionally learned through proximity to more experienced colleagues which can be costly, inconsistent, and entirely dependent on senior lawyers also being good teachers. AI can make that learning more structured, more consistent, and less dependent on senior time. Institutional knowledge that previously took years to accumulate can be made visible and accessible earlier.
Firms that invest in AI-augmented training will develop better lawyers more quickly. That’s both a competitive advantage and a genuine answer to the talent pipeline concern.
The firms that will thrive
The firms that succeed in this AI era will operate as well-run businesses with strong underlying systems, visibility into performance, and AI embedded in how work gets done, not bolted on as a separate layer of tools. That’s the foundation of a genuine firm advantage.
Law has survived every revolution it has faced. The opportunity now is to take a deliberate approach. Focus on how your firm operates as a whole and how technology can support that. Done well, AI won’t make lawyers obsolete. It will make your firm’s expertise clearer, your decisions better, and your judgement more valuable than ever.
See how Actionstep helps midsize law firms build their advantage. Talk to our team: www.actionstep.com
A version of this article first appeared on the Actionstep blog — read it here.
About the author
Triona Buckley is chief product officer at Actionstep. With more than 20 years shaping marketing, product and strategy at law firms and legal technology businesses across Australia, the US, Europe and New Zealand, she has built her career at the intersection of technology and mid-size law. At Actionstep, she leads the product vision for firms that want technology that works the way they do.
