The IBA’s Legal Agenda 2025, published in December, ranks AI as a ‘critical issue’, highlighting its transition from ‘an emerging concern to a regulatory and operational reality.’ An increasing number of tasks previously undertaken by young lawyers, interns and trainees can now be carried out relatively easily by AI – giving rise to questions about the future of the legal profession, including whether AI will take away jobs, or simply change the way a lawyer’s career unfolds.

In autumn 2024 the IBA produced its first comprehensive report on AI, titled The future is now: artificial intelligence and the legal profession. The report was produced by the IBA’s AI Task Force, which includes three working groups, focusing on regulation, the legal profession and best practices in AI, respectively.

‘When I started my career we had to work with documents. We had to analyse documents and we had to review documents,’ he says. ‘This will change, so that means that the young lawyer will not have contact from the beginning with the basics.’ Lund believes that this shift places more emphasis on law schools to thoroughly educate students on the basics.

Paul Paton, a current officer and former Co-Chair of the IBA Alternative and New Law Business Structures Committee, agrees law schools must educate their students on the fundamentals of analysis, while also ensuring they’re equipped to work with AI and other technology. ‘The role of legal education, in my view, is to prepare students for whatever ends up unfolding over the big arc of their careers,’ he says. ‘That puts a responsibility on law schools to understand what new tools there are and making sure students are prepared to use them ethically and responsibly.’

Understanding the results that technology is churning out is critical, say those who have examined the growth of AI and its impact. ‘I firmly believe AI is only as good as the lawyer using it,’ says Pranav Srivastava, Co-Vice Chair of the IBA Young Lawyers’ Committee. ‘For us to be able to review we have to go through the rigour of doing that work ourselves. Training methodologies will have to be established to allow lawyers to do that work manually up to a certain point of time.’

Paton – who’s also a professor at the Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University in California – says there’s a split among firms as to their expectations when it comes to AI knowledge. He cites the example of a US-based Big Law firm, with its own proprietary AI tools, which is banning its junior lawyers from using AI so that others in the organisation can assess their performance. The firm then expects associates to learn how to deploy AI tools responsibly for clients later on, once they have the requisite legal skills. ‘Doing due diligence has never been a passion project for a junior lawyer, but it is a way to learn about the transaction to build up the skills so that you can become a senior provider. That’s where firms need to work with junior lawyers to fill up the gaps,’ Paton adds.

However, AI need not be a threat to lawyers as they develop their careers. ‘There’s a bright future for the legal profession because AI [creates] a lot of legal challenges,’ says Lund, who’s a partner at Iberian firm ECIJA. ‘We can convert the problem into a virtue. There’s a lot of business there in terms of data and the legislation that’s coming up now, it’s all based on these kind of problems, so it gives you a lot of work.’

Srivastava, who’s a partner at New Delhi firm Phoenix Legal, suggests that the use of AI for mundane, routine tasks could actually be a benefit, keeping lawyers engaged and in the profession longer. ‘It is a profession where people face burnout, people face crazy work hours, [with] no semblance of having personal time, and I think AI resolves a lot of those problems,’ he says.

Client expectations are also changing. In-house counsel want their advisers to be efficient and cost-effective, and AI tools can help significantly with that. Further, Paton says law firms will have to rethink their billing models as AI use becomes more prevalent.

The legal community, overall, doesn’t seem to believe that AI is an existential threat to the profession. It will force adaptation in structure and in the way lawyers work, and legal professionals will have to remain vigilant to ensure they don’t get caught out by future developments. But a good lawyer of the future will be someone who can deploy the analytical skills still being taught by universities and also be able to work with AI tools to obtain useful, correct information from them.

This latter requirement is already proving challenging, with courts around the world grappling with case citations that have been generated by AI and that haven’t been identified as such by the lawyers relying on them. ‘AI is only as good as the prompt given to AI. Drafting prompts is going to become a skill in itself, as important as legal drafting,’ Srivastava says. Lund agrees, adding that ‘as always, law firms have to get used to this new situation, and young lawyers have to understand that AI is only a tool.’

Paton says law schools, firms and their lawyers all need to be aware of the risks and be able to use AI responsibly and ethically. Those who are able to navigate this should, he concludes, thrive in the new world the industry is entering.

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