Artificial intelligence

German Law International

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You know the story: the small village of Asterix the Gaul who – thanks to a magic potion – is able to vigorously resist the Romans’ constant attempts to conquer it. But why this comparison?

If we take a step back and look at the legal market, we can make out the following rough developments: law firms are professionalizing themselves and are increasing in size, legal departments are further emancipating themselves and are retrieving work that was originally outsourced, the internet is democratizing knowledge and the fight over resources is being intensified. And now the next extension stage has come with a double whammy. With the help of artificial intelligence, average lawyers are becoming specialists too, and writing competence is not a differentiating factor any longer. And clients are doubly satisfied: they can do even more themselves, and external costs will decrease thanks to increasing competition among legal service providers. Or, to transpose it to the story of Asterix, with the magic potion all the villagers, even the oldest, Geriatrix, are suddenly equally strong!

Adapting to the evolving legal landscape

This development is likely to affect lawyers with more seniority less since they have not only enriched their brains by learning and work in the past but have also sensitized their gut feeling over the course of all their decades in the profession. They also practice a culture of independent critical thinking. In this way, they possess precisely those strengths that are expected from legally trained business consultants when providing strategically circumspect support today. There is reason to fear, however, that the numbers of this kind of consultant are dwindling. This observation is relevant to all those who possess less “intrinsic value” and who are being upgraded by AI in one fell swoop and levelled off against each other.

This begs the question of how, in the future, can uniqueness be created in competition if legal expertise is increasingly useless for this very purpose? To ensure that it can be done all the same, the following approaches will be important: repositioning in strategy, business models (e.g., multi-disciplinary partnerships), customer-­relevant knowledge, non-legal expertise, social skills and service. Which, in turn, leads to further questions. What kind of employees will be in demand and what further training should they be given?

It is advisable to initiate the change process early on in order to ensure that crisis management will not be required.