The special relevance of lawyers in the age of AI is the profession's enduring value around the unique human capacity for independent judgment, fiduciary care, and preserving the law's connection to justice and human dignity
Key highlights:
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Lawyers excel at semantic legal work while AI excels in syntactic tasks — Syntactic work (document generation, pattern recognition) is where AI excels, but semantic work involving exercising independent judgment, reflecting on consequences, and fulfilling fiduciary duties remains uniquely human.
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Fiduciary duty as the core of legal relevance — What distinguishes lawyers isn’t just whatthey do, but how and why they do it. The fiduciary relationship demands human understanding of context, balances competing interests, recognizes unstated concerns, and exercises discretion.
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5 hours to deepen or diminish — The five hours lawyers are expected to gain each week by using AI can either accelerate professional obsolescence or deepen lawyers’ relevance, depending on what they do with it.
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This is the first of a two-part blog series that looks at how lawyers can keep their skills relevant in the age of AI
Lawyers expect to gain a full five hours per week of worktime due to the efficiency derived from AI use, according to the Thomson Reuters 2025 Future of Professionals Report. Yet the fear of job loss among lawyers is rising, as those viewing AI as a threat or somewhat of a threat grew from to almost two-thirds (65%) of those surveyed, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 AI in Professional Services Report.
Many in the legal profession are asking how lawyers are uniquely valuable at a time when machines can process legal information faster and cheaper. The answer lies in understanding the difference between what AI does in processing legal information and what humans do in exercising legal judgment, says Kevin Lee, Founding Director of the Institute for AI & Democratic Governance.
Defining 2 levels of legal work
Understanding what makes lawyers particularly meaningful in this current AI moment requires distinguishing between two different levels of legal work in an environment in which AI-enabled information systems are compressing humanity and legal judgment into data points and draining away the storytelling and moral nuance that ground both. According to Lee, these different levels involve the syntactic and the semantic:
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- Syntactic — Lawyers process information, generate documents, and recognize patterns at the syntactic level, meaning those tasks in which AI excels and delivers promised efficiency gains. “The danger is that we will use this efficiency merely to generate more syntactic volume,” Lee explains, adding that this will result in faster processing of more documents at greater speeds. “If we do that, we will have automated ourselves out of a profession.”
- Semantic — The semantic aspect of lawyering highlights the irreducible skills of the legal practice, which include exercising independent legal judgment, reflecting on consequences, demonstrating care for clients, and fulfilling fiduciary duties.
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This distinction between the semantic level is inherent within the practice of law definition, Lee says, pointing out that many jurisdictions distinguish between “providing legal information” (not practicing law) and “exercising independent legal judgment” (the essence of legal practice).
He also rightly contends that the existential risk facing lawyers is not in AI completing legal tasks, but rather the temptation to reduce lawyers’ role to verifying machine output and processing legal information. Conflating these two concepts is a challenge for the legal profession and requires increasing the appreciation for the craft of legal reasoning and judgment.
Making this more difficult is that the current information age complicates this picture by challenging society’s assumptions about reality, consciousness, and the moral meaning of human life — all at an exponential rate, Lee says. Similarly, AI and information systems threaten to reduce everything, including human beings and law itself, to processable data by stripping away the narratives and meanings that define humanity, he adds.
Semantic qualities of legal judgment
The question of what makes lawyers especially relevant in the AI era is mainly answered in how and why they do what they do, rather than in what they do. For example, Lee points to skills around executing their fiduciary duty and ensuring legitimacy and meaning as key characteristics of lawyers’ semantic qualities.
Fiduciary duty — When a client seeks legal counsel, it’s legal judgment — not information processing — that the client wants. Lawyers, as part of their fiduciary duty to their clients, demonstrate human and legal understanding of the unique context of each case and the consequences of various legal paths forward. This bond of trust between attorney and client demands reflection, consideration, care, and proper purpose.
The fiduciary duty of the lawyer to the client requires balancing competing interests, recognizing unstated concerns, and exercising discretion in ways that honor both the letter and spirit of the law. At the heart of this balance is legal reasoning and professional judgment, which often involves navigating the critical gap between legal rules as written and their meaningful application to human circumstances.
Legitimacy and meaning — Beyond the fiduciary of care exercised in individual client relationships, lawyers serve a broader purpose in their role to safeguard law’s connection to the narratives of justice and human dignity that legitimize its authority. Indeed, lawyers maintain the connection between law and its humanistic foundations, so that the narratives that give legal authority its legitimacy depend on this connection. “The artwork that one associates with the law (in law schools and courtrooms) connects actions and legal judgment of attorneys to the mythic meaning of justice, equality, and the rule of law,” Lee explains.
How to deepen appreciation for the special relevance of lawyers
The five hours that lawyers said they expect to gain each week through AI-driven efficiency represents a choice point for the profession. These hours can either accelerate lawyers’ obsolescence or deepen their relevance. To ensure the latter, Lee advises lawyers and legal institutions to examine ways to put those hours to good use by, for example:
Collaborating on apprenticeships — Bar associations, practicing lawyers, legal service providers, and law schools should consider apprenticeship models that teach professional norms and values through mentorship that allow law students to learn the craft of legal reasoning through guided practice.
Recommitting more fully to legal service — Law firms and in-house counsel must reclaim humanistic awareness as central to their professional identity. The efficiency gains from AI should be reinvested into semantic work, which include counseling clients, exercising moral judgment, and fulfilling fiduciary duties with greater care and reflection.
Improving legal education — Law schools must return to the humanistic formation of lawyers, echoing the vision of the pre-2007 Carnegie Report, before economic pressures reduced legal education to producing commercially exploitable graduates. In addition, AI ethics must be integrated systemically across the curriculum into doctrinal courses rather than being confined to elective courses.
Looking ahead
The five hours gained through AI represent a defining choice for the legal profession. The special relevance of lawyers in the AI age lies precisely in the human components and semantics aspects of lawyering.
In the concluding part of this blog series, we look at how the legal profession needs to rethink how it trains lawyers in order to prevent AI from eroding legal judgment skills
