Written by Steve Preston | Partner at Eden Rose USA
In 2018, I wrote an article titled “Will There Be a Robotax in Answer to Increasing AI and Automation Trends?“. 8½ years on I’ve revisited the article to see how right or wrong I was with the 2018 article.
Scoring my predictions:
I’d therefore say the intellectual framework was considerably better than the headline prediction. It was right to say that technology will change what humans do rather than simply eliminate the jobs for humans. However, it is good to add the fact that AI doesn’t eliminate an occupation doesn’t mean it won’t eliminate a significant proportion of the jobs within that occupation.
At Eden Rose we recruit Legal Specialists for Law Firms, where from 2018 to 2026 there’s a particularly interesting implication for our world of Legal Recruitment: law may be one of the professions where the 2018 article gets tested most aggressively. AI doesn’t need to replace lawyers to dramatically change the number of lawyers a law firm needs, the seniority mix, the economics of leverage, or what constitutes a junior lawyer’s job.
The question isn’t: “Will AI replace lawyers?”
It’s: “If one excellent lawyer equipped with AI can do the work previously performed by three lawyers, what happens to the other two?”
And then an even more uncomfortable question:
“If the profession needs fewer junior lawyers, how does it train the senior lawyers of the future?”
That, to me, is the real issue.
Back in 2018 the debate was largely “Will the robots take our jobs?”.
The question that I would ask now in 2026 is:
“If technology makes an individual professional dramatically more productive, how does an entire profession reorganise itself around that productivity?”
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
As always, do reach out should you need our recruitment expertise, solutions or just an update on the legal market as we see it. emailus@edenroselegal.com