Legal IT Insider’s 2025 Gen AI And The Practice Of Law Report will be published next week. The report is written by lead analyst Neil Cameron.
The report explores how Gen AI has moved beyond legal tech hype to become a fundamental catalyst reshaping the practice of law. Unlike prior innovations like OCR or search platforms, Gen AI offers not just efficiency but ‘epistemological disruption’ – altering the role of lawyers from originators to curators of legal content. The article highlights a shift from pilots to enterprise-grade adoption across firms, with AI tools now embedded in research, drafting, due diligence, and even client-facing applications. It claims that Gen AI’s outputs are already “often indistinguishable from junior-level legal writing,” raising ethical questions about the authenticity and authorship of legal work.
The article addresses risks such as hallucination, erosion of professional judgment, and data confidentiality, warning that overreliance on Gen AI may undermine junior lawyer development: “If junior lawyers are no longer doing the work that made them good, how do they become good?” The report urges firms to resist blind delegation and instead develop structured human-in-the-loop protocols and AI governance boards (now reportedly established in over 80% of AmLaw 100 firms). It also raises client trust concerns, suggesting that firms disclosing AI use in engagement letters may enjoy greater credibility.
On the economic front, the report argues that Gen AI disrupts law firm business models by flattening the traditional associate pyramid and weakening the billable hour. AI-assisted work compresses timelines and challenges the logic of billing by time, advocating for value-based or blended pricing instead. A potentially contentious observation is that “firms that cling to time as the sole metric of worth will struggle,” signalling a fundamental threat to conventional legal economics. It also notes that some firms may reduce junior hiring altogether, reallocating resources to technologists and AI workflow designers.
Finally, the report charts the divergence in global regulation, from the EU AI Act’s high-risk system requirements to more permissive stances in the US and UK. It anticipates a future where client expectations, AI maturity, and ethics collide – especially around client-facing tools that may constitute unauthorized legal advice, arguing that the firms who thrive “will not be those with the flashiest tools, but those that align AI strategy with firm culture, client needs, and legal obligations.
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