Why AI Disruption Is the Best Thing That Could Happen to Lawyers

It’s true: Artificial intelligence will commoditize an entire segment of legal practice. And perhaps sooner than we think, it will strip away the analytical work that has long defined the profession—document review, precedent research, inconsistency detection, first-draft generation. The disruption will be profound.

And it may be the best thing that could happen to the future of the profession.

Because what AI can’t replace is more valuable: strategic judgment, the capacity to advise under uncertainty, the human creativity that transforms analysis into direction. A moat will protect this work, but only if we’re prepared for the kind of work it demands. And ironically, the biggest obstacle to reaching that potential may be our own legal training.

Training in Detection—And Its Limits

Legal education is training in detection: find the risk, spot the flaw, identify the problem, articulate the answer. This is rigorous, valuable, and essential. It gave us something important.

Detection trained us to make sense of ambiguity, see how disparate issues connect, and find coherence in complexity. But even sophisticated synthesis of information is still analytical. AI also does this well—and quickly.

Detection also orients us toward what’s wrong rather than what’s possible. But boards and CEOs aren’t looking for more diagnosticians. They need navigators.

The kind of synthesis that matters now is interpretive: transforming what we detect into what we do.

The Gap Between Analysis and Strategy

Between analysis and strategy lies a conversion layer the profession avidly extols but inconsistently cultivates: judgment.

Judgment is where law stops being a technical discipline and becomes a leadership function. It is the capacity to transform analytical inputs into strategic direction—by reframing, weighing, and deciding amid uncertainty—and to carve a path forward.

AI doesn’t do this well. Rather, it works within the premises and assumptions we give it. An AI tool can effectively assess the viability of a legal argument. But it won’t affirmatively offer a reframing such as, “This legal argument is flawed, but the same facts could make a compelling policy case.” It won’t invert the premise. It won’t find a path that the question itself obscured.

That is what judgment does. It optimizes the plasticity of human intelligence—the capacity to rethink, redirect, and reimagine. That skill isn’t easily replicated. Analysis tells you the case law doesn’t support your argument. Judgment recognizes that you may be making the wrong argument because you’re asking the wrong question.

Strategy doesn’t emerge from more analysis. It emerges when judgment transforms analysis into actionable insight.

This is the gap. Lawyers are trained extensively in analysis. We are expected to develop judgment somewhere along the way. And we are asked to deliver strategy as if the progression were automatic.

It isn’t. And it is the shift our training doesn’t systematically develop.

Judgment is not only automation-resistant, but also where the value is. Plus, it’s why we became lawyers.

Disruption Resistance and the ‘Judgment Practice’

A “judgment practice” can feel abstract, but when we’re in it, we know it. I recently sat in a mediation involving a formidable counterparty—well-resourced, commercially important, high stakes. With our outside counsel, we used AI to supplement our preparation: We fed the tool our briefs, opposing materials, strategy memos, and even our late-night stream-of-consciousness assessment of likely positions and responses. The AI output was genuinely valuable—a “third voice” in the room that expanded our field of vision.

But when the 10:00 a.m. mediation stretched into night, it was just me and the senior partner at a conference table with cold coffee and expired plane tickets. The settlement wasn’t a number to be split. It was a murky mix of contractual revisions, negotiated terms, and hard-won concessions—less than we hoped for, more than they wanted to give.

The outcome required weighing the industry-inflected meaning of nuanced language being drafted in real time, anticipated commercial consequences, respective risk profiles, the recovery foregone, and the concessions required—and then deciding how best to present it to my CEO.

No algorithm integrates that. It is found in the trust between lawyer and client—an ineffable amalgam of expertise, experience, and emotional intelligence. It’s neither diagnosis nor synthesis. It is a distillation of inputs into an outcome that must be not only analyzed, but crafted—and then communicated to stakeholders and stood behind with both transparency and conviction.

This is why judgment legal practice is more than expertise. It rests on relationships. The lawyers who offer analysis for their clients risk displacement. The lawyers who navigate with their clients have a more secure and meaningful future.

The Forces Shaping the GC Role Today

General counsel today sit between two massive and accelerating forces: AI is automating the analytical support they once relied on, while boards and CEOs demand ever more strategic counsel on interdisciplinary risk. The space is isolating, and the need for genuine partnership has never been greater.

Judgment legal practice creates value through the relationship itself. The lawyers who become trusted partners in this space—helping in-house teams find a path through complexity rather than merely identifying its contours—forge a bond that is stable, renewable, and effectively immune from displacement. The counselor becomes essential not merely for what they produce, but for who they are in moments of uncertainty.

An entire segment of the profession—analytical, process-driven, undifferentiated—will be squeezed as commodity work becomes brutally price-sensitive. But judgment legal practice will be protected and more remunerative. Its output is not merely disruption-resistant—it compounds value for everyone it touches: the general counsel, the CEO, the board, and their stakeholders.

Using AI Disruption to Reframe Training and Apprenticeship

The question for the profession is whether we will cultivate judgment intentionally or continue to treat it as a skill born of self-discovery and osmosis.

Here is where disruption becomes opportunity—not just for preserving the heart of the profession, but for transforming how we develop its future practitioners.

The old model trained young lawyers on analytical work that is now becoming automated: document review, precedent research, inconsistency detection. Firms charged a significant markup and called it attorney development. But that work taught detection, not judgment.

And now it’s being commoditized.

The new model is something else entirely. Young lawyers can use AI not to review documents for facts—AI will do that—but to test strategic hypotheses and surface potential approaches, alternative framings, patterns across contexts. AI becomes a tool for strategic exploration, not just analytical processing.

Those outputs require a human in the loop—not merely to catch hallucinations or generate prompts, but to apply the judgment that comes from experience, creativity, and relational understanding. The young lawyer generates; the seasoned lawyer metabolizes. And this work happens best in person, sitting across a table, in real dialogue.

This reframes the return-to-office debate entirely. The value proposition isn’t sitting at a desk doing work you could do at home. It’s participating in the synergistic process of transforming AI-synthesized data and AI-generated strategic inputs into judgment-driven direction—a process that develops and models the very capacity we need to cultivate.

The strategic output is valuable to the client. The apprenticeship process is invaluable to the profession. Instead of billing for analytical work that machines will soon do better, we develop judgment through a deliberative process that can’t be automated—and that produces strategic counsel worth paying for.

This is why AI may be the best thing that happens to lawyers. Not only for the practice it preserves, but for the professional environment it creates—one in which we both practice and teach judgment simultaneously. By making the development of judgment intentional, visible, and central to what it means to practice law, we will find the deepest professional meaning.

That path isn’t a threat to the profession. It is an invitation: to become the kind of lawyers we were always meant to be.

Columnist Eric Dodson Greenberg is executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of Cox Media Group. Eric writes about leadership, legal operations, and the intersection of law and AI for Bloomberg Law’s Good Counsel column.

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