When the generative AI boom took off in 2022, Rudi Miller and her law school classmates were suddenly gripped with anxiety. “Before graduating, there was discussion about what the job market would look like for us if AI became adopted,” she recalls. 

So when it came time to choose a speciality, Miller—now a junior associate at the law firm Orrick—decided to become a litigator, the kind of lawyer who represents clients in court. She hoped the courtroom would be the last human stage. “Judges haven’t allowed ChatGPT-enabled robots to argue in court yet,” she says.

This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s Hype Correction package, a series that resets expectations about what AI is, what it makes possible, and where we go next.

She had reason to be worried. The artificial-intelligence job apocalypse seemed to be coming for lawyers. In March 2023, researchers reported that GPT-4 had smashed the Uniform Bar Exam. That same month, an industry report predicted that 44% of legal work could be automated. The legal tech industry entered a boom as law firms began adopting generative AI to mine mountains of documents and draft contracts, work ordinarily done by junior associates. Last month, the law firm Clifford Chance axed 10% of its staff in London, citing increased use of AI as a reason.

But for all the hype, LLMs are still far from thinking like lawyers—let alone replacing them. The models continue to hallucinate case citations, struggle to navigate gray areas of the law and reason about novel questions, and stumble when they attempt to synthesize information scattered across statutes, regulations, and court cases. And there are deeper institutional reasons to think the models could struggle to supplant legal jobs. While AI is reshaping the grunt work of the profession, the end of lawyers may not be arriving anytime soon.

The big experiment

The legal industry has long been defined by long hours and grueling workloads, so the promise of superhuman efficiency is appealing. Law firms are experimenting with general-purpose tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot and specialized legal tools like Harvey and Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel, with some building their own in-house tools on top of frontier models. They’re rolling out AI boot camps and letting associates bill hundreds of hours to AI experimentation. As of 2024, 47.8% of attorneys at law firms employing 500 or more lawyers used AI, according to the American Bar Association. 

But lawyers say that LLMs are a long way from reasoning well enough to replace them. Lucas Hale, a junior associate at McDermott Will & Schulte, has been embracing AI for many routine chores. He uses Relativity to sift through long documents and Microsoft Copilot for drafting legal citations. But when he turns to ChatGPT with a complex legal question, he finds the chatbot spewing hallucinations, rambling off topic, or drawing a blank.

“In the case where we have a very narrow question or a question of first impression for the court,” he says, referring to a novel legal question that a court has never decided before, “that’s the kind of thinking that the tool can’t do.”

Much of Lucas’s work involves creatively applying the law to new fact patterns. “Right now, I don’t think very much of the work that litigators do, at least not the work that I do, can be outsourced to an AI utility,” he says.

Allison Douglis, a senior associate at Jenner & Block, uses an LLM to kick off her legal research. But the tools only take her so far. “When it comes to actually fleshing out and developing an argument as a litigator, I don’t think they’re there,” she says. She has watched the models hallucinate case citations and fumble through ambiguous areas of the law.

“Right now, I would much rather work with a junior associate than an AI tool,” she says. “Unless they get extraordinarily good very quickly, I can’t imagine that changing in the near future.”

Beyond the bar

The legal industry has seemed ripe for an AI takeover ever since ChatGPT’s triumph on the bar exam. But passing a standardized test isn’t the same as practicing law. The exam tests whether people can memorize legal rules and apply them to hypothetical situations—not whether they can exercise strategic judgment in complicated realities or craft arguments in uncharted legal territory. And models can be trained to ace benchmarks without genuinely improving their reasoning.

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But new benchmarks are aiming to better measure the models’ ability to do legal work in the real world. The Professional Reasoning Benchmark, published by ScaleAI in November, evaluated leading LLMs on legal and financial tasks designed by professionals in the field. The study found that the models have critical gaps in their reliability for professional adoption, with the best-performing model scoring only 37% on the most difficult legal problems, meaning it met just over a third of possible points on the evaluation criteria. The models frequently made inaccurate legal judgments, and if they did reach correct conclusions, they did so through incomplete or opaque reasoning processes. 

“The tools actually are not there to basically substitute [for] your lawyer,” says Afra Feyza Akyurek, the lead author of the paper. “Even though a lot of people think that LLMs have a good grasp of the law, it’s still lagging behind.” 

The paper builds on other benchmarks measuring the models’ performance on economically valuable work. The AI Productivity Index, published by the data firm Mercor in September and updated in December, found that the models have “substantial limitations” in performing legal work. The best-performing model scored 77.9% on legal tasks, meaning it satisfied roughly four out of five evaluation criteria. A model with such a score might generate substantial economic value in some industries, but in fields where errors are costly, it may not be useful at all, the early version of the study noted.  

Professional benchmarks are a big step forward in evaluating the LLMs’ real-world capabilities, but they may still not capture what lawyers actually do. “These questions, although more challenging than those in past benchmarks, still don’t fully reflect the kinds of subjective, extremely challenging questions lawyers tackle in real life,” says Jon Choi, a law professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who coauthored a study on legal benchmarks in 2023. 

Unlike math or coding, in which LLMs have made significant progress, legal reasoning may be challenging for the models to learn. The law deals with messy real-world problems, riddled with ambiguity and subjectivity, that often have no right answer, says Choi. Making matters worse, a lot of legal work isn’t recorded in ways that can be used to train the models, he says. When it is, documents can span hundreds of pages, scattered across statutes, regulations, and court cases that exist in a complex hierarchy.  

But a more fundamental limitation might be that LLMs are simply not trained to think like lawyers. “The reasoning models still don’t fully reason about problems like we humans do,” says Julian Nyarko, a law professor at Stanford Law School. The models may lack a mental model of the world—the ability to simulate a scenario and predict what will happen—and that capability could be at the heart of complex legal reasoning, he says. It’s possible that the current paradigm of LLMs trained on next-word prediction gets us only so far.  

The jobs remain

Despite early signs that AI is beginning to affect entry-level workers, labor statistics have yet to show that lawyers are being displaced. 93.4% of law school graduates in 2024 were employed within 10 months of graduation—the highest rate on record—according to the National Association for Law Placement. The number of graduates working in law firms rose by 13% from 2023 to 2024. 

For now, law firms are slow to shrink their ranks. “We’re not reducing headcounts at this point,” said Amy Ross, the chief of attorney talent at the law firm Ropes & Gray. 

Even looking ahead, the effects could be incremental. “I will expect some impact on the legal profession’s labor market, but not major,” says Mert Demirer, an economist at MIT. “AI is going to be very useful in terms of information discovery and summary,” he says, but for complex legal tasks, “the law’s low risk tolerance, plus the current capabilities of AI, are going to make that case less automatable at this point.” Capabilities may evolve over time, but that’s a big unknown.

It’s not just that the models themselves are not ready to replace junior lawyers. Institutional barriers may also shape how AI is deployed. Higher productivity reduces billable hours, challenging the dominant business model of law firms. Liability looms large for lawyers, and clients may still want a human on the hook. Regulations could also constrain how lawyers use the technology.

Still, as AI takes on some associate work, law firms may need to reinvent their training system. “When junior work dries up, you have to have a more formal way of teaching than hoping that an apprenticeship works,” says Ethan Mollick, a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Zach Couger, a junior associate at McDermott Will & Schulte, leans on ChatGPT to comb through piles of contracts he once slogged through by hand. He can’t imagine going back to doing the job himself, but he wonders what he’s missing. 

“I’m worried that I’m not getting the same reps that senior attorneys got,” he says, referring to the repetitive training that has long defined the early experiences of lawyers. “On the other hand, it is very nice to have a semi–knowledge expert to just ask questions to that’s not a partner who’s also very busy.” 

Even though an AI job apocalypse looks distant, the uncertainty sticks with him. Lately, Couger finds himself staying up late, wondering if he could be part of the last class of associates at big law firms: “I may be the last plane out.”