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Technology has long promised to make the workforce more efficient. But, for lawyers, such efficiency doesn’t necessarily mean getting to leave the officer earlier – a problem that is almost entirely of the profession’s own making, writes Jerome Doraisamy.
New legal technologies, in particular AI, have more than proven their ability to significantly reduce time spent on myriad legal operational and process-driven tasks. As a former lawyer who has struggled with anxiety and depression, and who now has a front-row seat to the myriad exciting opportunities arising from fantastic tech platforms for practitioners across the spectrum, the question for me is what those productivity dividends subsequently provide, other than the capacity to take on more work. In my view, having more time in the day for a life outside of work should be a foremost consideration for a profession long plagued by disproportionately high levels of psychological distress, anxiety, and depression.
There is reason for optimism. Research in recent years has predicted that AI can and will save lawyers up to five hours per week, and as many as 12 hours weekly within five years. Such saved time, however, is broadly being framed by the profession as an opportunity to undertake more work for existing and new clients. This is the paradox at the heart of the age of AI: emerging technologies may give lawyers back more time, but there is nothing, or no one, to enforce lawyers keeping that time for themselves.
Compounding this problem is that while seven in 10 law firms say AI is already delivering meaningful time savings in day-to-day operations, many are still failing to use the technology in areas where it could have the biggest impact. Moreover, Australian practitioners lag global counterparts in identifying ways to use technology to save time in their workdays (50 per cent compared to 71 per cent).
Still, the technology is advancing faster than workplace customs. That distinction matters.
Lawyers do not merely have too much work; they are members of a profession that is organised around the assumption that more work can be absorbed. If a task that once took three hours takes 30 minutes, there is an obvious temptation to use the remaining two and a half hours to do something else, not to go home. Australian lawyers lose six or more hours each week to inefficient technology – more than eight working weeks a year. The implication is striking: the profession already possesses a vast reservoir of recoverable time, yet that inefficiency risks becoming normalised.
AI may, therefore, potentially risk becoming less a four-day-week technology than an intensification technology.
Law firms can use the productivity dividend to improve margins. Clients can demand faster turnaround or lower fees. In-house teams can handle more work without adding headcount. In-house departments are increasingly using AI to bring routine advisory work, contracts, research and risk triage back inside their organisations, effectively allowing teams to “do more with less”. And, lawyers themselves may simply acquire more work.
There is another possibility, however. As AI makes routine work cheaper and faster, the profession, as a whole, could eventually decide that not every efficiency gain needs to be monetised. Firms could shorten working hours, reduce unnecessary administrative burdens, and make responsiveness less synonymous with professional commitment.
That possibility matters because longstanding issues are not disappearing. Lawyers, not unlike other professionals, increasingly struggle to switch off, with an “always-on” culture, in which technology, and certainly social media, have made personal and professional boundaries harder to maintain.
None of this is to lay blame on the technology itself, which undeniably has been an extraordinary development for professional services like law, particularly in making justice more accessible for those most in need. Put another way: it isn’t the technology that will decide whether AI deepens existing, structural, and cultural issues in law. Lawyers, firms, clients, and the economics of legal services will.
AI could deepen that problem, or finally give lawyers the leverage to escape it.
The most realistic prediction, then, is neither utopian nor dystopian. AI is highly likely to make lawyers more productive. It is reasonably likely to make some lawyers’ working lives easier. But whether that becomes more life rather than more work will depend on whether the profession, or individual firms and teams, treat recovered time as a resource, or as time that belongs to the individual solicitor who recovered it.
For a profession that has long been tied to billing by the hour, that may be the hardest lesson AI has to teach.
