How AI Will Affect Lawyers: A Practical Guide for 2025

The Impact of AI on Lawyers

Before we get into use cases, it’s worth addressing the questions most lawyers are quietly (or loudly) asking. Is AI an existential threat to the profession, or just the most tireless junior you’ve ever supervised? What happens to pricing when task hours compress but client expectations rise? 

And, crucially, how do you harness the speed and scale of AI without compromising privilege, accuracy, or professional judgment?

Will AI Replace Lawyers? 

Every few years, the legal profession faces an existential tech crisis. In the 1980s, word processors and photocopiers supposedly spelled the end for legal secretaries. A decade ago, e-Discovery software was predicted to wipe out armies of junior associates doing document review. 

Now, it’s AI’s turn. Each wave of hype declares that robots will replace attorneys wholesale, and each time, reality proves more complex. 

As Carey Lening, a legal-tech consultant and ex-attorney said in Forbes: 

"Automation isn’t about replacing judgment. It’s about freeing lawyers to focus on what humans do best: empathy, ethics, and innovation. The future isn’t AI versus lawyers—it’s lawyers with AI."

With that being said, let's go through a role-by-role exploration of where and how AI will impact roles in the legal profession.

Impact of AI on Paralegals

Paralegals and legal assistants are often considered the most vulnerable to role automation. These professionals perform a lot of the foundational support tasks in legal matters: gathering and organizing documents, filling out forms, doing preliminary legal research, drafting routine filings and correspondence, managing case files, and so on. Much of this work is precisely what current AI and software can automate or simplify. 

It’s no coincidence that futurists often single out paralegals when discussing job automation in law. A widely cited Oxford study gave “paralegal and legal assistant” roles a whopping 94% probability of being computerized in the coming decades.

Multimodal platforms like V7 Go can ingest and analyze documents, spreadsheets, audio recordings, presentations and more at scale, reducing the need for manual administration.

That doesn’t mean 94% of paralegals will be out of a job, but it signals that a huge portion of what paralegals do day-to-day in 2025 technically automatable. This is likely to push the role to evolve, and not for the first time. 

As an article from Thomas Reuters notes, this has never been a static profession.

“Prior to the mid-70s, paralegals poured through law books digging for answers to prepare legal briefs. With the introduction of Westlaw, the hours they spent in the law library were converted to higher tasks. Legal document automation tools made paralegals even more efficient by simplifying the drafting process, again, freeing time to focus on analysis and case management. In neither case were paralegals deemed obsolete. In fact, they were empowered to do more.”

Consider what happens when routine work automates. Someone still needs to supervise, quality-check, and interpret the outputs. Many paralegals will likely transition into something closer to an AI operator or coordinators, leveraging their legal knowledge to make sure the tech is accurate.

For example, if an AI tool summarizes depositions, a paralegal with a keen eye will review those summaries and correct any nuances the AI missed. If an AI flags certain documents in discovery, the paralegal might be there to validate those flags and organize them for attorney review. 

Upskilling is critical here. Paralegals who proactively learn to use AI tools will make themselves significantly competitive in the job market. 

Impact of AI on Junior Lawyers

The standard model at law firms, especially big firms, has been to hire a flock of bright young associates each year, throw massive amounts of routine work at them (document review, legal research, diligence, basic drafting), and let them learn by doing grunt work under supervision, all while billing clients for many of those hours. 

This pyramid model has already been under pressure from clients demanding efficiency, and now AI is accelerating its reimagining. Firms may not need, or be willing to pay for, quite so many junior hours as before. 

The impact hasn’t been felt yet, with one recent report noting the law school class of 2024 achieved 82.2% employment in full-time lawyer jobs, a higher rate than the year prior. Still, many see it looming on the horizon.

There’s a vigorous debate here. On one hand, you have some partners openly musing, “If an AI can do 60% of a first-year associate’s work, maybe we hire fewer first-years.” If AI can handle large swaths of doc review and routine drafting, a firm might only need, say, 5 junior associates where it used to need 1o. Those 5 can manage the AI process and handle the truly complex bits.

It’s an alarming thought for law students and new grads. 

On the other hand, optimists point out that junior lawyers are still essential and that AI will free them from drudgery so they can develop more substantive skills faster.

As the grunt work often assigned to juniors is increasingly automated, new opportunities to learn and contribute may open up.

As Major, Lindsey & Africa (a legal recruiting firm) noted, “Yes, AI tools will supplant junior associates for many tasks, but don’t mourn the loss of these assignments. They are the most time-consuming and least interesting parts of a young attorney’s responsibilities.”

 Traditionally, junior associates have spent extensive periods drowning in doc review, legal research, and due diligence. Without these burdens, associates can focus on more analytical, strategic roles, diving deeper into case strategy, client interactions, substantive negotiation, oral advocacy, and skill building.

— Major, Lindsey & Africa

In sum, some traditional roles will shrink, but new opportunities (and potentially more exciting work) await those who are prepared. 

Impact of AI on Senior Lawyers and Partners

Finally, we turn to seasoned attorneys whose jobs revolve around high-level advisory, strategy, risk management, advocacy, and client relationships. These are the people who win clients’ trust, who negotiate billion-dollar deals or craft winning trial narratives. 

The good news is AI offers very little threat, and an enormous amount of efficiency. 

Consider the elements of a top lawyer’s job; exercising finely honed judgment under uncertainty, devising creative legal strategies, understanding a client’s business goals and pain points, negotiating with nuance and emotional intelligence, mentoring young lawyers, and maintaining relationships built on trust and credibility.  

An AI can’t sit across from a CEO and inspire confidence that “we have your back, here’s our plan.” It can’t read a jury’s body language. It doesn’t have intuition or gut feelings based on decades of war stories. And it certainly can’t network on the golf course or over dinner to generate new business.

The “human” side of legal practice, such as building relationships, will be more important than ever.

That said, senior lawyers cannot be complacent. Just because AI won’t replace them doesn’t mean it won’t change how they need to work. A partner who refuses to allow AI in their practice might become less competitive on cost and speed. Clients might say, “Why am I paying you for 20 hours of work that your competitor can do in 5 hours with the help of AI?” 

Similarly, if a senior lawyer never familiarizes themselves with AI tools, they won’t know the right questions to ask or the right tasks to delegate to AI, potentially missing opportunities or making avoidable mistakes.

Modern platforms like V7 Go can enable lawyers to work faster and more efficiently than ever before. Firms and lawyers who are slow to adapt may find themselves out-competed. 

Everybody, from a paralegal to a paralegal, needs to take steps to understand and effectively implement AI. In that spirit, we’ll start by exploring use cases for lawyers, before moving on to best practices and steps to become AI-ready.