Conversations about AI in the legal profession tend to contain a lot of hedges and qualifiers. Since launching Between the Briefs, Steno’s weekly podcast, in summer 2024, hosts Joe Stephens and Adrian Cea have spoken to dozens of attorneys and other legal leaders who’ve gone on record with specific, sometimes uncomfortable predictions about where AI is taking the profession.

The guests don’t all agree. Some see expansion. Some see erosion. Some see a structural power shift that will reorder the rankings. Five of those predictions stand out. They’re honest, specific, and occasionally contradictory in ways that reflect where the profession actually stands.

1. AI Will Make Every Billable Hour Worth More

Neel Chatterjee, former technology litigator and partner at Goodwin Procter LLP, has been around long enough to remember when eDiscovery was supposed to destroy the legal industry. Before that, it was online legal research. The industry is alive and well, but now the press is using AI to toll the death knell.

“Every time someone says some new technology is going to be the death of lawyers,” Chatterjee told Joe and Adrian, “the legal industry has grown.” The technology shifts how lawyers spend their time, but the demand for their professional judgment ultimately expands.

Much of the AI doomsday discourse centers around its potentially negative impact on the billable hour model. Chatterjee’s take is that AI will instead raise the value of the billable hour. A third-year associate billing at $900 an hour isn’t going to be paid for grunt work if AI can handle it. But they will be paid for their judgment. AI clears the path for lawyers to offer more of that judgment.

The historical record supports Chatterjee. Natural language search didn’t shrink the legal market when lawyers stopped using Boolean. eDiscovery didn’t either. Each new piece of technology changed the nature of lawyers’ work without reducing the overall demand for lawyers.

Hear Neel Chatterjee on why every technology shift has grown the legal market.

2. AI Will Hollow Out the Legal Profession

James Bremen, former chair of the construction and engineering practice at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, disagrees, and his argument is more specific than a general warning about AI replacing lawyers.

Bremen’s thesis is that AI is an unfit replacement for the grunt work that helps junior lawyers become competent senior lawyers, because it lacks a “moral compass.” He noted that when he points out an incorrect case citation to an AI tool, the system agrees immediately. In his eyes, this eagerness to concede is a major problem. Holding a position under pressure is a legal skill that lawyers who lean too heavily to AI may never develop.

Bremen pointed to a time early in his career when he spent months inside a shipping container filled with millions of documents, looking for the rare ones that mattered to his case. That kind of grinding, tedious, formative work was how he honed his skills and is exactly what he believes AI is replacing.

“What it’s going to do is hollow out our profession,” he said. “The steps where you’re learning to do the things which are important are removed, and you’re less prepared when you need to do the really hard things.”

Hear James Bremen on why AI might hollow out the profession.

3. Plaintiff Firms Will Out-Earn BigLaw Within Three Years

JP Son, chief legal officer at Verbit, made a particularly bold revenue prediction. Within three years, he said, we could see a plaintiff firm top the gross revenue rankings for U.S. law firms, ahead of the typical corporate giants.

He believes that, because BigLaw bills by the hour, AI efficiency causes a problem. Firms make less money for the same work product when the work takes 30 minutes instead of three days. Plaintiff firms using the contingency fee model don’t have that problem. Their incentive is the settlement or the verdict, not the hours logged. Speed translates directly into more cases, bigger verdicts, and higher fees. There’s no downside.

“If I were an enterprising plaintiff’s attorney,” Son said, “I would be all over AI, and seeing how can I just leverage this to the max?”

The firms that already run lean and move fast to reach that final number are best positioned to harness AI efficiency. Son predicts that the economics of legal work will be forced to shift accordingly, and the revenue rankings will follow.

Hear JP Son on why plaintiff firms are poised to out-earn BigLaw.

4. AI Will Expand Demand for Legal Services by 10x to 50x

Cowen Group founder David Cowen thinks everyone is looking at the wrong data. The conversation about AI and the legal market focuses almost entirely on how many lawyers will be replaced and how many billable hours will be lost. Cowen instead focuses on untapped clients.

“I think you’re going to see a 10x or 20x or 50x in demand for legal services,” he said. “I don’t think we’re seeing a shrinking pie.”

He uses Home Depot to make his point. Before big box hardware stores, people who could afford a contractor hired one for problems large and small. People who couldn’t simply left problems unfixed. Home Depot didn’t put contractors out of business. It created a new category of customer. Suddenly, people who couldn't afford a contractor could at least fix the small problems themselves while the serious structural issues still went to professionals.

AI, Cowen argues, does the same thing for legal services. Currently, people who can’t afford an attorney unfortunately go unrepresented. Lower the cost of entry with AI and now they can access legal help. The complex litigation and high-stakes deals still go to bespoke firms. BigLaw retains its market and AI-first boutiques create a new one.

Hear David Cowen on why the legal market is about to get so much bigger.

5. Insurance Companies Will Push for AI Arbitrators

David Coale, an appellate practice leader at Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann, LLP, offered a specific structural prediction. Insurance companies, he said, will move to replace human arbitrators with AI arbitrators for standard, lower-stakes disputes. “That may be a good thing,” he added.

The prediction is grounded in an observation about AI’s longer trajectory. ChatGPT was released in late 2022 and is already unrecognizable as the same product after hundreds of upgrades. Similarly, Coale argues that in another four years, legal AI platforms will have moved just as far, bearing little resemblance to those being used and debated over now.

He told a story about a pro se litigant who recently tried to use an AI avatar to argue their case, and the judge shut it down about 30 seconds in. Coale’s point wasn’t that the attempt was absurd—it was that the next version might not be so easy to dismiss.

Hear David Coale on why AI arbitrators may be closer than you think.

The Jury Is Still Out

These five predictions don’t reconcile. Chatterjee and Cowen see expansion, Bremen sees erosion, Son sees a structural power shift, and Coale sees automation moving into unpredictable spaces. They’re all working from the same evidence and arriving at different conclusions. Which is, in the end, what lawyers do. If you have a prediction of your own, share it with us on LinkedIn.

A new episode of Between the Briefs drops every week. If these five guests made you think, check out more of Joe and Adrian's conversations on a range of fascinating topics. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.