At WG, we are committed to delivering value to clients, which we define as exceptional legal services at reasonable rates. We are client-centric lawyers that view client relationships in terms of years and mutual growth, not billable hours.
In line with this philosophy, we are embracing the opportunities afforded by artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) to enhance the quality and efficiency of our services, and thereby provide even greater value to clients. For more on this, see article.
This article is a broader discussion on the impact of AI and other legal tech we currently see on legal services and possible future implications.
Will AI replace lawyers?
No one can predict the future, and many prognosticate a future full of opportunity or concern. Rather than speculate about entire professions, the current utilization of AI and other legal tech already demonstrates tremendous impact and value as well as future implications.
Indeed, AI is already automating slices of lawyers’ traditional tasks—summarizing discovery, suggesting contract language, and answering first-pass research questions. On the transactional side, OneSaaS, for instance, used AI to analyze more than a thousand SaaS contracts, discovered that 95 percent were functionally identical, and then released a free, community-drafted “standard cloud agreement” that allows business teams to handle a first draft without outside counsel.[1] On the litigation side, Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel Core can digest a gigabyte-scale document set, surface key clauses, generate chronologies, and prepare deposition outlines in minutes, collapsing work that once justified entire associate teams into a supervised, same-day task.[2]
These adoptions are not confined to boutique firms. Allen and Overy’s rollout of Harvey-powered workflows put generative AI on the desktops of 3,500 lawyers across 43 offices,[3] demonstrating that even AmLaw top-ten firms are willing to outsource routine drafting and analysis to machines so long as humans remain on the hook for final judgment.
Consumers see the same possibilities: services like DoNotPay have already generated demand letters and small-claims filings for pro-se litigants—so aggressively, in fact, that the FTC intervened this year to stop the company’s “robot-lawyer” marketing claims,[4] proof that the access-to-justice upside is real even as regulators police the line between helpful automation and unauthorized practice.
Nonetheless, AI cannot replace the core of lawyering: strategic judgment, ethical accountability, and the human skill of persuasion. Strategic judgment is more than pattern-matching past cases to present facts. It requires spotting latent conflicts among statutes, reading unwritten courtroom dynamics, and weighing business, reputational, and human costs that clients themselves have not fully articulated. That is why even the most AI-forward law firms still route every machine draft through a partner who knows the judge, the industry, and the likely ripple effects five quarters out. As the ABA’s Formal Opinion 512 reminds us, the duty of competence demands lawyers exercise “legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation,” a standard that presumes a human actor who can synthesize law, fact, and risk in real time.
Persuasion, too, depends distinctly on human capacities: empathy, storytelling, and the ability to pivot when a witness hesitates, or a juror frowns. Negotiation scholars note that AI may narrow information gaps, but in high stakes bargaining, it still stumbles over emotional cues, moral intuitions, and the creative trades that turn zero-sum positions into mutual gains.[5] Jurors, judges, and counterparties respond to credibility, nuance, and the ineffable chemistry of live advocacy, which are qualities machines can model but not genuinely embody. The lawyer’s irreplaceable value lies in wielding tools with judgment, integrity, and persuasive force—capacities rooted in human experience, not code.
How AI Enhances Service Quality and Value
Despite its inability to completely replace lawyers, AI is becoming an indispensable tool for speed and scale. The integration of AI and other legal tech not only boosts efficiency but also elevates the quality of legal services we provide. By automating aspects of our practice, our attorneys can dedicate more time to strategic planning and personalized client interactions, ensuring that we in fact do increase the value to clients. Simply stated, by automating historically manual time-consuming tasks, attorneys are able to do more, better and faster.
The reality is that adoption of AI tools is accelerating at a clip the legal sector has never seen. A Secretariat-ACEDS global survey released in March 2025 found that 80 percent of legal professionals now rate themselves as knowledgeable about AI and 74 percent expect to be active users within a year.[6] NetDocuments reports a 315 percent jump in everyday AI use by law firm staff from 2023 to 2025, with 79 percent of firms weaving AI into daily workflows.[7] Reuters notes that AI tools are penetrating firms “five times faster than the cloud,” showing that what once took a decade now happens in a couple of budget cycles.
The legal landscape is constantly evolving, and staying ahead requires a proactive approach to technology adoption. By integrating AI and other legal tech into our practice, we can improve operational efficiency and access greater resources without additional overhead, directly leading to more value to clients. This integration brings opportunity. Thomson Reuters calculates that AI can free four lawyer-hours a week, worth roughly $100,000 in additional annual billable capacity per U.S. lawyer.[8] A recent case study from an Am Law 100 firm shows how generative tools are collapsing hours of clerical effort into minutes of supervised review: by unleashing Everlaw’s GenAI assistant on 126,000 documents in a government investigation, the team cut review time by 50–67 percent and needed only one-quarter of the personnel normally assigned to a matter of that size.[9]
AI’s rapid expansion is not just a story of shiny new tech; it is an operating-model shift that lifts the administrative fog from legal practice. The firms that lean in are already converting clerk-work into thinking-time, freeing lawyers to draft the winning brief, craft the creative deal structure, and build the client relationships that machines still can’t replicate.
AI’s Increase to Access to Justice
One of the greatest benefits to be conferred by AI will be the overall societal gain of increasing access to justice, i.e., making legal services more accessible and affordable to a greater population of people. For instance, scholars note that AI-powered tools, if made interoperable with court systems, could narrow the access-to-justice gap and reduce routine matters that reach attorneys in the first place.[10] The Legal Services Corporation reports that low-income households receive inadequate or no professional help for 92 percent of their serious civil-legal problems, a gap that technology is now beginning to narrow.[11] AI-enabled self-help apps are doing for everyday legal tasks what TurboTax did for tax returns. In Utah, Rasa uses natural-language triage to help people clear criminal record blemishes; HelloPrenup shepherds couples through do-it-yourself agreements; and LegalZoom remains shorthand for low-cost wills, LLC formations, and trademarks.[12] Even courts are joining in: British Columbia’s Civil Resolution Tribunal resolves small-claims and condo disputes entirely online, without lawyers, for flining fees that start at forty dollars.[13]
The result is a layer of good-enough justice for matters that would otherwise go unaddressed. A Stanford study, for example, found that a first-generation chatbot overturned 160,000 parking fines in London and New York, demonstrating how machine-scale advocacy can democratize relief.[14]
Nonetheless, even if a startup founder can spin up OneSaaS and crank out a standard cloud-services contract in ten minutes, the deal is only half-done. The template still has to be stress-tested against the company’s risk profile, negotiates into a commercial context, and shepherded through closing without tripping securities or export-control land mines. That is where the lawyer’s enduring value lies, and why AI turns attorneys from information gatekeepers into risk-and-strategy partners. The net effect is a bar that must justify its value through insight and strategy, not information gatekeeping. Clients will still seek counsel for nuanced advocacy, but they will expect faster turnaround and proof that their lawyers can curate AI output safely.[15]
Ultimately, while AI is expanding the front door to the legal system, the hallway still leads to rooms where human judgment rules. By embracing a hybrid model by letting machines handle the form while lawyers handle the form-advisory, firms can serve a broader audience without sacrificing the depth of counsel that high-stakes matters demand.
Staying Afloat and Ahead
Lawyers who thrive in the AI era will pair technical fluency with timeless professional duties. The first rule of thriving in an AI era is that technological competence is no longer a bonus skill; it is an ethical baseline. The ABA’s Formal Opinion 512[16] makes that explicit, folding AI awareness into Model Rule 1.1’s duty of competence and warning that lawyers must understand the benefits of every tool they deploy, from data-handling practices to the likelihood of hallucinated text.
Forward-thinking law firms are responding by weaving AI literacy into every day tedious tasks, making prompt-engineering as routine as Bluebook citations. NetDocuments’ 2025 Legal Tech Trends echoes this shift: 75 percent of legal employers expect to re-write job roles within two years to favor AI-fluent lawyers and technologists.[17] Law 360’s 2025 AI Survey found that roughly two-thirds of BigLaw attorneys have already completed firm-run GenAI training, versus 40 percent at midsize shops—a gap that tracks client perception of value.[18]
The roadmap to resilience is clear: embed AI literacy in your ethics framework, erect governance that keeps humans firmly on the hook, invest in continuous training, and redeploy the time dividend toward strategic counsel that clients can see and feel.
[1] https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/02/10/law-insider-launches-onesaas-new-standard-for-cloud-agreements/
[2] https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/how-genai-can-enhance-your-legal-work-without-compromising-ethics/
[3] https://www.lawnext.com/2023/02/as-allen-overy-deploys-gpt-based-legal-app-harvey-firmwide-founders-say-other-firms-will-soon-follow.html
[4] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/02/ftc-finalizes-order-donotpay-prohibits-deceptive-ai-lawyer-claims-imposes-monetary-relief-requires
[5] https://www.alignednegotiation.com/insights/what-ai-can-and-cant-do-for-negotiation#:~:text=Many%20negotiations%20rely%20on%20personal,that%20extend%20beyond%20mere%20numbers.
[6] https://secretariat-intl.com/insights/ai-adoption-surges-in-the-legal-industry/
[7] https://www.netdocuments.com/blog/ai-driven-legal-tech-trends-for-2025/
[8] https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/how-ai-is-transforming-the-legal-profession/
[9] https://www.everlaw.com/blog/case-studies/am-law-100-firm-slashed-doc-review-time-by-two-thirds-with-genai/
[10] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/interoperable-legal-ai-for-access-to-justice
[11] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/interoperable-legal-ai-for-access-to-justice
[12] Id.
[13] https://civilresolutionbc.ca/solution-explorer/
[14] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/interoperable-legal-ai-for-access-to-justice
[15] See, e.g., Mata v. Avianca where the Southern District of New York sanctioned counsel for filing a brief laced with fictitious, “hallucinated” cases that ChatGPT had invented, underscoring that a lawyer, not a model, must vouch for accuracy and reasoning. ( https://www.acc.com/resource-library/practical-lessons-attorney-ai-missteps-mata-v-avianca )
[16] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/professional_responsibility/ethics-opinions/aba-formal-opinion-512.pdf
[17] https://www.netdocuments.com/blog/ai-driven-legal-tech-trends-for-2025/
[18] https://www.law360.com/pulse/articles/2299565/biglaw-leaps-ahead-in-generative-ai-training