Attendees at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
All week at CES, I’ve been bombarded with session after session on AI and what it can do. I have seen more AI-based products than I can recall, many of which will never see the light of day. AI is everywhere at CES. It’s a bit much, frankly.
But on Thursday, a CES panel presentation tackled a question that’s been on my mind all week. What do all these AI tools mean for the future of work in general? What do businesses and, for that matter, workers need to do to prepare for the brave new world that everyone here seems to be promising and promoting?
A related question for me, of course, is how all these tools will impact what lawyers and legal professionals do and how they work. What will the potential AI tools mean for everyone who works in legal?
The panel presentation was entitled Embracing AI: Revolutionizing the Future of Work and featured several HR/AI experts.
What Does the Future Look Like?
The panelists generally agreed that, as a preliminary matter, businesses need to realize that the new AI tools compel them to rethink how employees do their work and how they can best use the AI tools at their disposal. Businesses and workers need to accept the fact that AI tools will eliminate the nonproductive work that humans now do — preparing minutes, creating action items, summarizing documents, etc. That work will be done by AI.
Secondly, AI programs will enable the important work to be done much more efficiently, eliminating work humans now spend time doing.
And finally, and importantly, AI will enable work that was impossible to do before because it took too long or cost too much. These facts are given.
What does that mean for the workforce? Some, maybe most, workers will not have the same amount and kind of work to do as they have had. That can be a problem. But on the plus side, the panel cited statistics that support the idea that there are a lot more things that could be substantively accomplished if workers didn’t have to waste time on unnecessary tasks. Granted, the workers in question were higher up the food chain in their organizations.
All panelists agreed that as AI begins to do more, management will need to shift what workers do. Workers will require new and different skill sets. Management will need new ways to assess performance.
A New Gameplan
There are two ways, of course, to accomplish the shift. The first is to simply replace the existing workforce with a new workforce that has the required skills. But to do so often means getting rid of good workers who best understand the mission and culture of the company and whose departure would mean wholesale disruption.
The better way is to reskill the existing workforce to deal with and contribute to the new work realities. That’s not easy, the panelists agreed, and it requires first an understanding of what skills will be needed. It also involves the creation of training programs to get workers those skills and, perhaps most challenging, convincing workers to buy in and make a change (nobody likes change, especially at work).
There are no easy answers to the coming disruption, but at least that’s a game plan.
What About Legal?
At first blush, it would seem the panel’s reskilling game plan should also work for legal. But there are some problems.
First, law firms, lawyers, and legal professionals don’t like change. They don’t like change. Getting buy-in from the stakeholders, from partners to associates to paralegals and everyone else in a law firm, won’t be easy.
But there’s a more fundamental problem, especially for many law firms. It’s the billable hour business model. Yes, AI can eliminate time spent on certain tasks, which might be considered nonproductive work the panel referred to. But when some of that nonproductive work is billable, it’s not regarded as nonproductive under the billable hour model.
So, talking about changes, identifying work AI can do, and then reskilling workers may strike at the very heart of the business model.
It may well be that for law firms to take advantage of AI for themselves and their clients, they will first need to rethink what it means to be successful. What does it mean to be a good lawyer when AI can be used to better and more economically serve clients? A better baseline understanding may be needed before a firm can figure out how to best use AI and how to reskill its workers for that use.
Starting with shopping for AI products just because it’s trendy and everyone is talking about it isn’t going to effectuate the kind of change we will see in most businesses.
Oh, by the way. Those businesses making changes to accommodate the new world of work? They also may be clients who have some new expectations for their law firms.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.