Bosses at one white-shoe law firm in New York are stating unequivocally that chatbots won’t be a job killer, maybe even the opposite – even as rumors spread across the legal industry that hiring pools will soon face significant cuts, On The Money has learned.
Speculation has swirled inside New York-based Fried Frank – a half-century-old powerhouse whose clients include Goldman Sachs and real estate giant Tishman Speyer – that the firm could soon reduce a big chunk of its incoming classes of junior associates, sources close to the firm said.
That’s outright false, senior people at the firm told me. Yes, this year’s crop of junior associates numbered 60, down from 87 in 2023. But that’s mainly because of a surge in hiring three years ago to address an industry-wide pandemic-driven spike in demand for legal services, they say – including those related to corporate mergers and acquisitions.
The size of this year’s entering class is more in line with what’s anticipated in the years ahead, senior partners at the firm say – no matter what the media have been blaring about AI and its supposedly devastating effects on law firms.
“We have no plans to cut associates,” said a senior partner at the firm who asked not to be quoted by name.
Instead, the partner said, AI will be used to make lawyers more productive, enabling them to spend more time with clients and focus on the big stuff. Same with junior lawyers. That means more work and better jobs at the firm.
“We see this — just like other technological advances over time — as providing opportunities for lawyers,” the partner added.
At this point, nearly every lawyer at the biggest firms use AI in one way or another since bots can find information by scanning millions of pages, tracking down relevant case law in seconds. AI can also write in the legalese that it takes years to teach a human lawyer.
Give those tasks to a bot and your partners can do the stuff algos can’t, wooing clients and providing high-level guidance that the chatbots are still ill-equipped to dole out, according to Fried Frank’s bosses.
Fair enough. Still, I just don’t buy the argument that the legal profession will see a surge in jobs because of these productivity gains. A smart lawyer can’t be replaced by a bot, and maybe years from now that will still be the case. But most lawyers are no different than most doctors, or plumbers and reporters – they aren’t amazingly skilled at their jobs.
Plus, so much of what is considered legal work and even advice is formulaic. I just can’t imagine that first year associates who perform the more formulaic tasks won’t see those functions being handled by bots, resulting in at least a chunk of these jobs getting eliminated.
Fried Frank employs “over 800 lawyers across its global offices, with total staff—including professional, administrative, and support staff—often cited between 1,000 and 1,650,” according to Google’s AI tool known as Gemini. It took me a second to find out these facts that might have taken me a good hour or maybe two, three or four in the past depending on when the firm’s flacks return my call.
You get my drift: Maybe the company will double in size over the next three to five years as it embraces AI that continues to get stronger and smarter, doing more and more complex tasks at a fraction of the human cost.
Maybe, but somehow I doubt it.
As we reported last week, Morgan Stanley targeted for elimination 2,500 positions that can be replaced at lower cost and more efficiently by bots, as did Jack Dorsey’s latest creation, a fintech company called Block.
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