Harvard Law Today recently spoke with David Wilkins ’80, Lester Kissel Professor of Law, about what the future holds for the practice of law and legal education in the face of new challenges, such as the introduction of AI, the expansion into law by professional services companies, and political turbulence.
In this second part of a longer interview, Wilkins, who is also the faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, shares his outlook on hiring trends, workplace culture clashes, and how legal education is evolving to meet the needs of today. (Read part one here.)
HLT: In the first part of our interview, you brought up the relationship between AI and legal jobs. What do you think will happen with jobs and hiring in the next year?
Wilkins: There has been a lot of hype around AI and jobs. It is certainly true that many aspects of legal work are already being automated — this trend will undoubtedly accelerate in the coming year and beyond. But it is important to remember that the effort to automate legal work has been going on for a long time. Indeed, when I started teaching in 1986, first-year students were prohibited from using Lexis and Westlaw to write their research memos even though these tools were already widely used in practice.
Nevertheless, law firms and other employers will certainly look at these tools as creating the potential for reducing entry-level hiring, given that much of the day-to-day work of entry-level lawyers — document review, drafting, legal research — can now be done increasingly well by AI. This doesn’t mean, however, that overall hiring will fall dramatically if law students who come into legal organizations bring other kinds of skills that create value. People who are able to integrate new technologies into a sophisticated problem-solving approach for clients, for governments, for NGOs and nonprofits, will always be in demand. The future is not machines instead of people. It’s people who know how to use and work with technology to help address increasingly difficult and complex problems. At Harvard Law School, we are lucky because the presumption is that our students are going to be the ones who will bring this kind of value, but we need to ensure that we are putting them in a position to do so.
“The future is not machines instead of people. It’s people who know how to use and work with technology to help address increasingly difficult and complex problems.”
Of course, much of the pressure on entry-level hiring — and hiring in general — has nothing to do with technology. Since January 20, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have slashed jobs across the federal government, including many in the legal sector. Some of these jobs may move to state and local governments, but these sectors are also under tremendous financial pressure, as are NGOs that rely on government funding.
Indeed, the ripple effects of the public sector cuts are likely to be felt in the private sector as well, although they are also likely to generate legal work too, as lawyers fight over the legality of many of the president’s actions. The same is true of AI, which at least in the short term is likely to be a welfare act for lawyers, as everything from disputes over intellectual property, liability for hallucinations, and the reach and interpretation of new AI regulations will be litigated on all sides. This is why we are going to see more and more law firms creating specialized practice areas dedicated to handling these kinds of disputes.
HLT: Do you think these changes will affect smaller firms in the same way?
Wilkins: Outside of Big Law, the impact of technology is likely to be complex. On the one hand, small and medium-sized law firms are already increasingly turning to technology to “leverage up” the capacity of their lawyers to be more productive in ways that make them more competitive. On the other we are already seeing a number of tech startups offering DIY services directly to consumers in areas such as wills, real estate, and even fighting parking tickets that have traditionally been handled by these kinds of firms. As technology improves both the ease of use and accuracy of AI tools, the number of such startups is likely to grow significantly in the coming year. And while rules against unauthorized practice and outside investment still remain a challenge for these companies, the willingness of states like Arizona and New Mexico to license experimental models in their regulatory “sandboxes” will continue to put pressure on other states and the American Bar Association to loosen these restrictions.
The fact that Arizona granted KPMG, one of the Big Four professional services companies, permission to practice law in the state — with the other three surely to follow — underscores how these regulatory reforms might affect legal employment. Although the jury is still out on how successful the Big Four will be in their latest attempt to enter the legal market, there seems little doubt that they and a number of other so-called “alternative legal service providers” such as investigation firms, managed services companies, and legal process outsourcers, will actively compete with law firms and other traditional providers for both talent and clients in the coming year.
HLT: How might these factors impact compensation and competition in the market?
Wilkins: All of this will continue to fuel competition among law firms. Already in the first few months of the year, we have seen the bidding war for top partners continue to escalate, as firms try to lure lawyers who have large “books of business” with eyepopping salaries (many of which are now guaranteed for several years) as a way of entering new markets or increasing their profitability.
Indeed, the threat of losing superstar partners, particularly in transactional areas, is one of the factors that has led several leading law firms to negotiate deals with President Trump. When real or threatened executive actions make it difficult for firms to gain necessary interactions with, or approvals from, federal regulatory officials, it then makes it difficult to close deals and therefore makes the partners who do this work vulnerable to being “poached” by other firms that are not (yet) subject to such restrictions, taking their clients with them. Law firms that lose partners and clients in this way risk “unraveling” as other partners and clients quickly head for the door in search of safer (and greener) pastures.
“When real or threatened executive actions make it difficult for firms to gain necessary interactions with, or approvals from, federal regulatory officials, it then makes it difficult to close deals.”
Although the implications of the Trump administration’s actions for the legal profession continue to unfold and be hotly debated, this dynamic is one of the many ways these actions against law firms are destabilizing legal markets and hurting clients — and ultimately American competitiveness. As some companies scramble to relocate their existing legal work, others, particularly those considering locating or moving operations to the U.S. — the very action the President’s policies are designed to produce — now have to weigh the risk that they will not be able to engage the best law firms if they find themselves in a dispute with the government before making their investment decisions.
At the same time, general counsels are under increasing pressure to reduce costs. This means that while law firms are paying huge salaries to acquire or retain star partners, they are also likely to face pressure by general counsels to use AI and other technologies to reduce fees and streamline work. This in turn will require firms to redefine how they bill for legal work. You cannot bill for AI by the hour. Lawyers will need to find ways to bill clients on the basis of the value that their legal work creates as opposed to the time it took to produce it. Collectively, all of these pressures are likely to make the market for increasingly volatile in the coming year.
HLT: Last year, you talked about how Gen Z and millennials were demanding new kinds of workplace policies, including remote-friendly options, and a greater attention to well-being and flexibility. Do young people still have as much power in the workplace, and how do you predict our work culture will continue to change?
Wilkins: We are definitely going to see a lot of conflict! There’s been an increasing backlash against remote policies. Some of this is for important reasons because we have yet to figure out good ways of building culture and collaboration outside of the office. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t do these things, but it does mean that employers and employees must be much more intentional in their efforts to create a vibrant and stable culture in the new hybrid workplace. On the other side, those urging people to come back to the office need to do a better job of articulating why it is valuable, not just for the organization, but for individual workers to be in the office. And it can’t just be “that’s the way I did it,” or “that’s the way people have always learned,” but tied to real and tangible benefits for professional development and personal growth.
HLT: Is that amount of disagreement about workplace policies healthy for the profession? What’s the solution?
Wilkins: Although all of this is scary, it is also exciting. How can we rethink our understanding of “work,” and how can we build vibrant and inclusive workplaces that are both efficient and sustainable? How can humans work with machines while preserving core human values like creativity, empathy, and professionalism? How can we create new pricing and delivery models that reward efficiency and innovation? How can we train young lawyers in ways that both produce outstanding lawyers and encourage the best and the brightest to continue to want to join our profession? Answering these questions will require us to critically examine what parts of our traditional ways of working we should keep — ways that have built the American legal profession into the model for the world — and which parts we need to be willing to change to create an even greater profession fit for the greater challenges of the middle decades of the twenty-first century.
This rethinking is critical to the future of our profession. It is no secret that there is a chronic exodus of people leaving the profession, particularly women, people of color, and other traditional outsiders. And the people at the top have been trying to make up for it simply by paying more money. But as any economist will tell you, at some point money has a diminishing marginal return. We’re now dealing with a new generation who have lived through a pandemic and through two recessions, and they’ve seen people be burnt out, chewed up, and destroyed by work. The minute the economy goes down, they get laid off.
When people say, “Young people are not loyal to institutions,” young people say, “Well, how loyal have you been to our parents or our older brothers and sisters?” And the problem is you cannot build effective institutions without trust. Right now, trust has been broken in lots of different ways, and one of our major tasks — this is not so much a prediction as a hope—is to is to begin to work actively and consciously to repair trust.
HLT: Given all of this, what do you predict for the future of legal education?
Wilkins: I keep coming back to this duality — it’s a challenging but exciting time for legal education. It’s challenging because the model of legal education is based on the core idea of teaching people how to think like a lawyer. We used to have a clear idea of what thinking like a lawyer was. It was thinking like a common law lawyer, reading common law cases and statutes, and understanding legal institutions. This is still incredibly important. With each passing year, there is an explosion in the number of new laws and regulation in the U.S. and around the world.
But lawyers must now understand a new and incredibly complex legal landscape in the context of an increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) and multipolar world driven by new technologies and riven by new geopolitical tensions. In this world, we cannot assume that people have common understandings of even the most basic principles or even basic facts. We haven’t even touched on how we determine what facts are in a world in which misinformation is everywhere. Thinking like a lawyer is more important than ever. But thinking like a lawyer has to be thinking like a problem solver. It has to be thinking about being an empathetic listener. It has to be thinking about how to work collaboratively with people who have different orientations and perspectives, and who bring different theoretical or methodological lenses to problems. It’s being a member of the team, not always leading the team.
“As law schools, we should be teaching students that, while the instability all around them can be scary, it also means that their ideas and unique expertise around things like technology and cross-cultural fluency are more important and relevant than ever.”
These are real challenges for a world where we have developed people with very narrow, very specific silos of knowledge, information, beliefs, and relationships. Law schools have to teach their students to recognize these silos — and then how to break through them. To do so, we must recruit students from the widest possible array of backgrounds and then provide a learning environment that facilitates open and honest dialogue and disagreement. At the same time, we still have to train students around the fundamental ideas of legal analysis and legal interpretation and legal writing. Those things are still critically important. That’s a huge challenge, but it’s also an exciting one because everyone can contribute.
HLT: Any parting thoughts?
Wilkins: A managing partner of a law firm recently said to me, “It’s a tough time for junior lawyers.” But, he said, “You know what? The problems we’re grappling with now, there are no experts.” It used to be you had to work your way up from being the 10th person on the team, to being the 5th chair, then the 3rd, before one day becoming the leader. Now everybody’s dealing with problems that are novel, at least in their presentation. In this world, expertise can and should come from everywhere. As law schools, we should be teaching students that, while the instability all around them can be scary, it also means that their ideas and unique expertise around things like technology and cross-cultural fluency are more important and relevant than ever. And that makes it an exciting time to be a young person coming up in this profession.
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