The Future of Law
The future of law is often discussed as a technology story.
I think it is a much larger story about the evolution of the legal profession itself.
Artificial intelligence and legal technology are changing not only how lawyers perform legal work, but who participates in the creation of legal value, how legal expertise gets organized, and what it means to build a career in law.
From practice to build
For generations, the central professional identity available to someone trained in law was straightforward: practice law.
That identity is expanding.
A growing number of legally trained people now build the products, technologies, companies, knowledge systems, workflows, and organizations through which law operates.
The future legal profession will include both practitioners and builders.
The AI-native legal profession
The next generation of legal professionals will enter an industry in which artificial intelligence is assumed rather than exceptional.
Their competitive advantage will come less from performing information-processing tasks manually and more from judgment, relationships, creativity, problem definition, system design, and the ability to orchestrate human and machine intelligence.
More on this in AI and law.
The expanding definition of a legal career
A legal education is becoming a foundation for many kinds of work, not a single path. Legal tech careers is where that expansion is most visible today.
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Ben Chiriboga is a lawyer, founder, and legal technology executive. More about Ben.