They consume vast tracts of content, cost a packet to train and graft well past normal office hours. Junior lawyers have much in common with generative artificial intelligence. Galling, then, for the former to face pay stasis — Slaughter and May is freezing their salaries at ￡150,000 for now — while more spending is being thrown at AI.
Expect the machines to continue shouldering more of the workload. Fusty image notwithstanding, lawyers have been deploying tech for nearly a century: dictaphones in the 1950s and two decades later the clunky red UBIQ that enabled case law search without recourse to libraries.
Today tech is corralled to zip through documents, conduct due diligence, summarise cases and even draft simple ones. It can handle matters like conveyancing or litigation; one of England’s newest law firms uses AI to prepare “polite” debt chasing letters for just ￡2.