Talent
FUTURE OF PROFESSIONALS
Research Sees Transformation in the Talent Model for Delivery of Legal Services
By Natalie Runyon
Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has dominated conversations across the legal industry over the last year. Insights from our Future of Professionals research, which included asking 640 legal professionals about how they see AI impacting their workplaces and careers, reveal that serious transformation in the talent model to deliver legal services is necessary to meet Gen AI’s potential.
AI most definitely creates opportunities for gains in productivity and internal efficiencies, such as more effective and faster client communications and service as well as improvements in giving clients strategic business guidance. Efficiency in workflow is one of the biggest anticipated benefits of Gen AI as well. More and more bandwidth will be freed up for higher-value work, enabling professionals to meet the strategic advisory needs of their clients and to focus on the work for which their skills will be more suited.
Indeed, training & career development and recruitment are the most likely areas of disruption within the talent space once Gen AI becomes a fixture in the workplace, according to our research.
As the Future of Professionals report made clear, 90% of legal professionals expect basic mandatory AI training for all professionals to become the norm over the next five years.
Revolutionizing training and development
AI and Gen AI are causing and will continue to instigate an onslaught of new training and development requirements, from basic training on how to make best use of AI to the need for upskilling and reskilling of existing professionals. As the Future of Professionals report made clear, 90% of legal professionals expect basic mandatory AI training for all professionals to become the norm over the next five years. In addition, 88% of legal respondents said they believe everyone will need training on new skills, with 33% anticipating these needs to arise within the next 18 months.
Research findings suggest that changes to how junior professionals are educated on the job and within higher education will be another major area of change. In fact, two-thirds of legal professionals said they see a change in how junior professionals will need to be trained, with a similar proportion predicting a change in the nature of university or college training within the same time frame.
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Training and Development
In the next 18 months
Within 18 months – 5 years
No change expected
Basic-level AI training as mandatory
Other new skills required for all
Change in how juniors are trained within firms/departments
Increase in people without the traditional qualifications
Change in the nature of university/college training
New career paths
The rise of the professionals, with skills more highly prized
As AI-powered tools come into more widespread use in legal practice, developments to training will be vital to ensure junior lawyers in particular understand how to use the tools appropriately. The nuance of this is important. “There is a tendency to use AI large-language models as the shortcut to the answer rather than as the tool to enhance the answer,” noted one lawyer respondent. “If people are not strictly guided towards using AI towards the latter purpose, training in general will suffer as early career professionals will no longer work to understand the outputs but rather use the outputs as their legal advice.”
Indeed, two areas that are likely to change quickly are:
i) technology skills; and ii) professionals’ capabilities around deepening expertise and specialization.
Upskilling in technology, particularly around AI, will emerge as a key requirement. Evolving skill sets to learn how to maximize the outputs of Gen AI by asking the right questions in the first place – known as prompt engineering – is one example in this area.
In addition, the potential of AI to remove the need to invest time and effort in technical work creates mental bandwidth for professionals to consider higher-level thinking and deepening their specialization in specific areas of expertise, adding to the value potential of the empowered advisor.
Recruitment disruptions expected
Overall, respondents to the Future of Professionals survey said they believe that the number of professionals will increase; however, more than half of legal professionals (52%) said they believe that fewer entry-level positions may result. This is likely based on the premise that many of the tasks that junior lawyers now do will be overtaken by Gen AI.
Lower recruiting budgets also might be an expected reality of AI. Indeed, AI is already bringing some efficiencies to candidate screening. And those firms investing significant resources to woo early career professionals with JDs may find those efforts wasted with the arrival of Gen AI and the expectation of a lower number of entry-level positions. “With limited budgets, it is likely that money will be spent on new technology rather than training existing or recruiting new staff,” stated one survey respondent.
Nevertheless, technology is seen as a key element in attracting younger talent. Gen-Zers (those professionals born between 1997 and 2012), have grown up with easy access to mobile technology and prefer employers that are leaning in on utilizing the latest technology and AI in their operations. “Younger people are more in tune and interested in emerging technology,” said one survey respondent. “The legal field is historically slow to adjust and update, so having AI can help recruit younger and more well-versed employees.”
As AI-powered tools come into more widespread use in legal practice, developments to training will be vital to ensure junior lawyers in particular understand how to use the tools appropriately.
Barriers in Utilizing AI
Ranked 1st
Ranked 2nd
Ranked 3rd
Risk aversion and/or fear of change
Lack of technology skills within the profession
Lack of investment in new technologies
Lack of diversity of thought within the profession
Firm partnership models
Lack of pressure on external providers from corporate and government clients
Fears of change and job loss spur worries
Legal professionals face certain barriers in fully capitalizing on the opportunities presented by Gen AI due to their risk aversion. In fact, 83% of legal professionals surveyed cited risk aversion or fear of change as the top barrier.
Of course, there will always be resistance to change, but even those professionals that said they were willing to embrace change recognize the challenges they face. When asked, unprompted, what new challenges the rise of AI might bring, the most common answer was an anticipated steep learning curve to gain new skills related to the use of AI.
In addition, job displacement is one of the biggest macro-fears of AI, fueled by the perception that the new technology is a competitor – rather than a complement – to the professional. “Competing against a computer that can read everything is daunting,” explained one survey respondent. “Humans simply cannot keep up.”
Revolutionizing talent delivery through AI
AI and Gen AI further represent a transformative revolution that has been unfolding over several years, characterized by rapid progress and fundamental shifts in paradigms. Leaders and individuals will need to transform how they approach their work and future career development in several key ways.
1 in 10
legal professionals equate the rise of AI to winning the lottery
1 in 10
legal professionals liken the rise of AI to a zombie apocalypse
Most
take a cautiously optimistic outlook to the rise of AI
The biggest hope for 40% is that AI will free up their time to focus on higher level tasks.
The biggest fear for 21% is that the rise of AI will bring widespread job loss.
15% fear that it will bring about the demise of the profession.
INSIGHT
Lawyers generally agree that the talent model for the delivery of legal services will change with the rise of AI.
Within the next 5 years:
believe a basic level of AI training will be necessary
believe other new skills will be required for all
believe new career paths will emerge
believe there will be an increase in legal professionals without traditional qualifications performing legal work.
predict a change in how junior lawyers are trained
believe the nature of how future legal professionals are trained at university will also change
Recommended actions for existing legal professionals
Define your vision
of what you want your legal career to look like, given the reality of AI
Define your strengths
as part of a self-evaluation along with weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
Define yourself
as unique from your peers based on your expertise and credentials
Guidance for leaders
In order to navigate the ongoing disruptions effectively and achieve success in both the present and the future, leaders of professional services firms and in-house departments will need to adopt a visionary and strategic capability to spearhead the operational and profit potential of AI.
AI most definitely creates opportunities for gains in productivity and internal efficiencies, such as more effective and faster client communications and service as well as improvements in giving clients strategic business guidance.
Of particular importance is leaders’ ability to proactively enable the transformation to the era of Professional 2.0 collectively rather than adopting a passive wait-and-see mentality. Indeed, leaders must use the capabilities of AI and Gen AI to reshape and adapt their previous approaches to talent delivery as well as the training and development of new skills to get their talent to the level that leadership envisions.
Guidance for individual lawyers
Despite the inevitable disruptive nature of AI in the years to come, individual professionals need to be poised to take action to better evaluate their professional strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats on a regular basis. They also need to develop a career action plan to capitalize on professional growth opportunities and minimize professional limitations. By doing so, individual professionals can unlock the potential positive impacts of AI and Gen AI and effectively navigate the uncertainties that will undoubtedly arise.
Generative AI will not replace highly trained lawyers, but a lawyer using Gen AI will certainly replace one who isn’t using the technology. There will be new opportunities created by the advanced automation of tasks, and we need to train humans for these prospects. If business and AI work together, legal professionals will be able to focus on building a new value exchange with clients, customers, and their peers.
CONTRIBUTOR
Natalie Runyon
Director ESG Content and Advisory Services
Thomson Reuters Institute
