In ABA Techshow keynote, Jordan Furlong says lawyers need to level up to survive in post-AI world
For the past 25 years, Jordan Furlong has studied and even anticipated changes in the legal profession.
During Thursday’s ABA Techshow keynote address, “The Lawyers We’ll Need: Preparing the Legal Profession for a Post-AI World,” Furlong shared one of his latest predictions: Lawyers will no longer be indispensable amid generative artificial intelligence tools that can do their work faster and at a lower cost.
“On into the future, legal services will still be delivered. Legal solutions will still be acquired,” said Furlong, a legal industry analyst and consultant from Ottawa, Canada. “But what about lawyers?”
Lawyers are facing two existential crises, Furlong noted. As AI increasingly provides legal knowledge, it threatens to take over the work of lawyers and undermine their professional purpose. He said AI also will eliminate most legal tasks that are given to young associates, removing their training ground and the incentive for firms to hire them.
“When I’m talking to managing partners, this is the thing everybody is worried about,” Furlong said. “We don’t know where the future lawyers are going to come from, and we don’t really know what to train them to do.”
So where does the legal profession go from here?
“We level up,” Furlong said. “As a profession, we come to terms with and we accept that the fundamentals of how this profession has operated over many years have come to an end, and we say, ‘OK, fine, but we can rise to this challenge.’”
Lawyers need to do three things to differentiate themselves from AI and ensure their continued success, Furlong said. They need to build a new professional identity based on trustworthy guidance; they need to establish a new professional purpose around civic responsibility; and they need to create a new professional pathway based on proven competence.
Breaking these roles down further, Furlong explained that lawyers need to understand what it means to be a “human lawyer.” He said lawyers need to assure their clients that they will provide personal counsel and stand with them to defend their rights. He also said lawyers need to be willing to accompany their clients on every step of their legal journey.
“This is the one thing that lawyers can and should be able to do,” Furlong said.
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Lawyers also need to understand their role as a “civic lawyer” who garners meaning through their service to society, Furlong said. As part of this, lawyers should demand that no one is above the law—but no one is beneath it either.
“No one is so poor, no one is so vulnerable, no one is so marginalized that they don’t get the same rights as the rest of us,” Furlong said. “To be able to summon that on a profession-wide basis would be far more transformative than anything AI could do to us.”
To build a human profession and a civic profession, lawyers also have to build a new system around proficiency, Furlong said. They should identify what skills lawyers need to practice in a post-AI world and create new learning environments that help them develop those skills. He also said they should offer new methods of evaluating practice-readiness.
As one example, Furlong suggested the formation of a “teaching law firm” that operates in the same way as a “teaching hospital.” He said this could potentially make completion of a law degree and the bar exam unnecessary in the future.
“These are wild suggestions, these are radical notions, but we are in a radical time,” Furlong said. “We are at a turning point in the history of the legal profession.”
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