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With headlines warning that AI is coming for junior lawyers becoming impossible to escape, one law student is pushing back against the panic, calling the narrative “fear-mongering” and arguing that the threat to entry-level legal jobs is not quite what it seems.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, Sai Muthukumar, a paralegal with Gilbert + Tobin and the Attorney-General’s Department, pushed back against growing fears that AI will wipe out junior lawyer roles, arguing that the reality is far more nuanced than the headlines suggest.
With more law graduates entering the profession than there are available roles, Muthukumar said competition for graduate positions has intensified, leaving aspiring lawyers facing an increasingly crowded and uncertain path into the profession.
“The recent trend in the last few years has been that there are more law graduates than there are law jobs. So it is quite a competitive industry,” he said.
“I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve secured a graduate position at an international law firm for next year. So I’ve been very privileged in that sense.”
But while competition for graduate roles remains fierce, Muthukumar said students should not let the growing noise around AI convince them that their careers are on the chopping block.
“With that being said, I find that some of it is fear-mongering as well, that people are believing that AI will be the be-all and end-all of all junior law work. That is not the case,” he said.
Rather than replacing junior lawyers outright, Muthukumar argued that AI remains far from infallible, with human oversight at both junior and senior levels still essential before its work can reach clients, relevant parties, or the courts.
“AI still makes a lot of mistakes, and there needs to be vetting both at a junior level and at a senior level before that work can go to clients or relevant parties or into the court system,” he said.
Muthukumar explained that the real shift young lawyers need to understand is not that technology is replacing them, but that it is reshaping their roles and moving them away from the typical “grunt work” traditionally expected in the early stages of their legal careers.
“Some of the fear is from the mainstream media in how they’re showing the advances that AI is making, which it is,” he said.
“I think what students need to see is that simply the fact that the role of the lawyer is changing from one of, I suppose, doing the grunt work to then shifting towards more of the work which more senior lawyers have been doing in the past, which is client interactions, working out strategy, what are the next steps?”
As AI reshapes legal work, Muthukumar said the next generation of lawyers will need to look beyond the law itself, pairing strong drafting and client skills with the commercial nous to see the bigger picture, anticipate consequences, and understand the real-world impact of their advice.
“I believe how students will need to be trained in the future, in law school and beyond, will need to be altered to build a balance between teaching the core skills of drafting, speaking to clients, and building relationships,” he said.
“But also being able to see the big picture in the sense of being able to see what is the impact of the commercial advice being given by a lawyer onto the client, what are the implications of the consequences and then how to still assist.”
