At every legal technology conference, the same promise rings out: AI will automate the drudgery so lawyers can focus on what really matters. While it's a seductive vision, it's also contradicted by the best research we have on what actually happens when knowledge workers adopt these tools
Key points:
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The productivity promise is largely wrong — Emerging research shows that AI doesn’t reduce work — it intensifies it. Lawyers work faster, take on broader responsibilities, and extend their hours without recognizing the expansion. Further, because prompting AI feels like chatting rather than laboring, lawyers slip work into evenings and weekends without registering it as additional effort.
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Self-reinforcing acceleration is the real risk — AI speeds tasks, which raises expectations, which increases reliance, which expands scope, ultimately creating a cycle that drives burnout in a profession already plagued by it.
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Purposeful integration is the antidote — Legal organizations need to promote intentional governance structures that account for how people actually behave with AI, not how leadership imagines they will or should.
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Welcome back to The AI Law Professor. Last month, I examined how AI is forcing us to rethink training for junior lawyers. This month, I examine a question that affects every lawyer: What happens when the efficiency gains we’ve been promised don’t materialize the way we expected? A recent study out of UC-Berkeley suggests the answer is more troubling than most law firm leaders realize.
If you’ve attended a legal technology conference anytime over the past two years, you’ve heard the pitch: Automate the mundane and elevate the meaningful.
A study published [subscription needed] in the Harvard Business Review by UC-Berkeley researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye suggests we should be more skeptical. They tracked how generative AI (GenAI) changed work habits over eight months at a 200-person technology company. Their findings were striking — AI tools didn’t reduce work; rather, they intensified it.
According to the study, the tech employees studied were shown to work faster, take on broader responsibilities, extend their hours into evenings and weekends, and multitask more aggressively — all without being asked to do so. The promise of liberation became a reality of acceleration and overwork.
For those of us in the legal profession, this should be a wake-up call.
Three forms of intensification
The researchers identified three patterns that will sound familiar to anyone watching lawyers adopt GenAI in their work processes.
Task expansion
Because AI fills knowledge gaps, professionals stepped into responsibilities that previously belonged to others. Product managers started writing code, and researchers took on engineering tasks. In legal contexts, the parallel is obvious. Associates use AI to attempt tasks once reserved for senior lawyers. Paralegals draft documents that previously required attorney oversight. Solo practitioners take on matters outside their core expertise because their AI tools make it feel manageable. The result isn’t less work distributed more efficiently, it’s more work concentrated in fewer hands, with less institutional knowledge guiding the output.
Blurred boundaries
AI blurred the boundaries between work and non-work. Because prompting an AI feels more like chatting than labor, lawyers (like the tech workers in the study) may slip work into lunch breaks, evenings, and commutes without registering it as additional effort. The conversational interface is seductive precisely because it doesn’t feel like work. It is work, however, and much more of it.
Pervasive multitasking
Workers managed multiple AI threads simultaneously, generating a sense of momentum that masked increasing cognitive load. For lawyers, this means running parallel research queries, drafting multiple documents at once, and constantly monitoring AI outputs, all while believing they’re saving time.
The productivity trap
The most important insight from the research is that these effects are self-reinforcing. AI accelerates tasks, which raises expectations for speed. Higher speed increases reliance on AI, and greater reliance expands the scope of what people attempt. And expanded scope generates even more work. Rinse and repeat.
Parkinson’s law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
In a profession already plagued by burnout, this cycle should alarm us. The legal industry’s adoption of AI is being driven largely by the promise of doing the same work in less time. But if the Berkeley research is any guide, what actually happens is that we do more work in the same amount of time, or more work in more time, while telling ourselves we’re being more productive.
And because the extra effort feels voluntary, firm leadership may not see the problem until it manifests as errors, attrition, or ethical lapses. In law, the cost of impaired judgment isn’t just a missed deadline — it’s a client’s liberty, livelihood, or life savings.
From productivity to purposeful practice
The Berkeley researchers propose what they call an AI practice consisting of intentional norms and routines that structure how AI is used, including determining when to stop and how work should and should not expand. I’d go further. For legal organizations, purposeful AI integration requires more than workplace wellness norms. It requires a strategic framework that aligns AI capabilities with organizational mission, ethical obligations, and sustainable human performance.
This means, first off, being honest about what AI actually does to workloads rather than what we hope it will do. If your firm adopted AI expecting to reduce associate hours, audit whether that has actually happened, or whether associates are simply filling reclaimed time with more work.
Second, it means building governance structures that account for how people actually behave with these tools, rather than how leadership imagines they will. The Berkeley study found that workers expanded their workloads voluntarily, without management direction. Top-down AI policies that focus solely on permissible use will miss the intensification that could be happening in plain sight.
The most important insight from the research is that these effects are self-reinforcing. AI accelerates tasks, which raises expectations for speed. Higher speed increases reliance on AI, and greater reliance expands the scope of what people attempt. And expanded scope generates even more work.
Third, it means preserving space for the distinctly human work that AI cannot replicate, such as judgment, empathy, ethical reasoning, and the kind of creative problem-solving that emerges from genuine human dialogue — not from a conversation with a chatbot. The researchers also found that AI-enabled work became increasingly solitary and continuous, a dangerous trajectory.
The narrative that AI will free lawyers for higher-value work isn’t just optimistic. It’s a misunderstanding of how these tools interact with human psychology. AI doesn’t create leisure. It creates capacity — and without intentional structures, that capacity gets filled, not with strategic thinking, but with more of everything.
While it’s clear that AI will change the legal profession, the real challenge is whether law firms will integrate AI with purpose, shaping it to serve their values, their clients, and their professionals’ well-being. Or, whether they’ll be allowing the technology to quietly shape us into something we didn’t intend to become.
Tom Martin is CEO & Founder of LawDroid, Adjunct Professor at Suffolk University Law School, and author of the forthcoming AI with Purpose: A Strategic Blueprint for Legal Transformation (Globe Law and Business). He is “The AI Law Professor” and writes this eponymous column for the Thomson Reuters Institute.
You can find more about the use of AI and GenAI in the legal industry here
