I Am a Lawyer. And I Am Slowly Replacing Myself.

I should probably start with a confession.

I built a website about AI replacing people’s jobs. And I am one of those people.

I have two master’s degrees in law. I studied abroad. I have years of experience as in-house corporate counsel. Right now, in March 2026, I have more work than I can comfortably handle. My clients trust me. My pipeline is full.

And I am fairly certain that within two years, most of what I do will be done by AI.

I don’t say that with panic. I say it the way you might acknowledge that a storm is coming while you’re still sitting in the sun. The weather is fine right now. But I’ve seen the forecast.

The private life I never had

Here’s the part that nobody in my profession wants to admit out loud.

AI has given me something I haven’t had in ten years of legal work: a private life.

Lawyers don’t talk about unbillable hours. But every lawyer knows what they are. The reading you do to stay current. The thinking you do in the shower. The Sunday evening you spend reviewing a contract because a client is anxious and you don’t want them to wait until Monday. None of that gets invoiced. All of it gets done.

AI has quietly absorbed a huge portion of that. First drafts that used to take me two hours now take twenty minutes. Research that once meant an evening now means a coffee break. The firms I work with are starting to use tools like Spellbook — AI built specifically for contract review and drafting, directly inside Microsoft Word. What used to take a junior associate a full day now takes the software a few minutes.

For the first time in my career I am leaving my desk at a reasonable hour and not feeling guilty about it. The work-life balance that every law firm puts on their website but nobody actually has — I’m starting to feel it. At 40 years old. For the first time.

The number I can’t stop thinking about

A Harvard Law School study found that in high-volume litigation, AI reduced the time spent on a complaint response from 16 hours down to 3 to 4 minutes. Not a small improvement. Not a 20% efficiency gain. A complete collapse of the time required.

And that’s today. With tools that are, by any reasonable measure, still early.

The platforms currently designed for lawyers — Spellbook, Harvey AI, CoCounsel — are built for legal professionals. You need to know what you’re doing to use them well. The output still requires a trained eye. A client can’t just log in and generate their own commercial contract without someone who understands what they’re looking at.

But I keep thinking: for how long?

I have watched AI go from “interesting toy” to “indispensable colleague” in my own workflow in under two years. The gap between what these tools require and what a reasonably educated non-lawyer could manage on their own is closing. Not closed. But closing.

The day a company’s CFO can open a browser, describe what they need in plain language, and receive a solid first draft of a commercial agreement — without picking up the phone — that day is not science fiction anymore. It is a product roadmap. And the people building that product are very well funded.

What this actually means

I want to be honest about what that means for someone like me.

The high-end advisory work — the judgment calls, the strategic counsel, the moments where a client needs a human being to tell them what they should actually do rather than what the contract technically allows — that will last longer. Maybe much longer. I genuinely don’t know.

But the volume work? The drafting, the reviewing, the standard agreements, the routine due diligence? That is already being automated. I can feel it in how I work. I am doing it myself. Every time I let AI handle a first draft, I am participating in the slow replacement of the version of my job that most lawyers actually spend most of their time doing.

My sister lost her translation career to AI without seeing it coming. I built this site partly because of her. And here I am, watching the same thing approach me from a distance, with enough runway to actually do something about it.

I don’t know what legal practice looks like in five years. I’m not sure anyone does. What I do know is that the lawyers who are pretending this isn’t happening are making the same mistake my sister made — not out of naivety, but out of a very human preference for not having to think about uncomfortable things while everything still feels fine.

Everything still feels fine. The work is there. The clients are happy. The days end at a civilized hour now.

And yet.