ResourcesBlog
Why AI Is Likely to Increase Legal Demand—Not Reduce It
January 15, 2026
January 15, 2026
By: Jay Harrington. Jay is the leader and founding Partner of Latitude’s Detroit office. A former Big Law attorney and founder of a boutique law firm, he has spent more than 25 years practicing law and advising lawyers and legal organizations on strategy, productivity, and practice growth. He is the author of The Productivity Pivot, The Essential Associate, and One of a Kind.
Every major technology introduced to make lawyers more efficient has ultimately increased the demand for legal work.
In theory, email was supposed to streamline communication. Document review technology was supposed to reduce staffing needs. In reality, both technologies changed behaviors, raised expectations, and expanded the volume of work flowing through legal teams.
Today, some argue that artificial intelligence will be different—that this time, efficiency gains will finally translate into less work for lawyers. A 2023 Goldman Sachs report suggested that approximately 44% of legal tasks could be automated. However, despite dire predictions, there has been no meaningful impact on overall legal employment. In fact, legal jobs have continued to grow steadily, including among new law school graduates—the cohort many expect to be most vulnerable to AI-driven disruption.
According to the National Association for Law Placement, the employment rate for the law school class of 2024 reached a record high of 93.4% among graduates for whom employment status was known, with an unemployment rate of just 5.1%—the lowest level recorded since NALP began tracking these figures in 1982.
Ultimately, it may be true that AI will negatively impact legal employment. But it is by no means certain, and history suggests caution in assuming it will be. That uncertainty has practical consequences for how law firms and legal departments think about staffing in the years ahead.
When James Watt improved the efficiency of the steam engine, economists expected coal consumption to decline. Instead, it rose. Cheaper, faster energy encouraged broader use. This pattern—often referred to as the Jevons Paradox—has repeated itself across industries ever since.
The logic is straightforward. When something becomes faster, cheaper, or easier to use, organizations tend to find more ways to use it. Time saved on individual tasks often results in more work across the organization.
Legal leaders have experienced this dynamic firsthand.
Email offers an intuitive example. When email first emerged, many lawyers assumed it would save time. After all, communications that once required phone calls, memos, or meetings could be handled quickly and asynchronously. In theory, email should have reduced friction and interruptions.
Instead, it transformed the pace and volume of legal work. Because email was fast and cheap, communication exploded. Clients came to expect near-instant responses. Colleagues copied entire teams “just in case.” Matters that once involved a handful of interactions now generate hundreds of messages, each prompting additional follow-up.
Email did not reduce legal work. It multiplied it.
Document review technology provides a more nuanced but equally instructive example. Over time, advances in review software did reduce demand for certain categories of document review work. We see that today. But that impact took decades to materialize; far longer than early predictions suggested.
Importantly, document review software was designed to address a narrow, well-defined task, and therefore is particularly well suited to technological automation. Even so, for many years efficiency gains were outpaced by explosive growth in data volumes, more aggressive discovery strategies, and expanding litigation scope. Robust demand for document review attorneys persisted far longer than expected before structural change finally took hold.
Like earlier technologies, AI promises efficiency. What distinguishes it is scope. Rather than affecting a single category of work, AI has the potential to touch many of the tasks lawyers routinely perform—from drafting and review to analysis, internal communication, and decision-making.
That breadth of potential impact will not translate into change all at once, and in many organizations it has not yet meaningfully begun. Most legal teams are still experimenting with tools, running pilots, and observing developments closely. This early-stage experimentation mirrors what many legal departments are experiencing as they assess not just AI tools, but the talent and capabilities needed to support them. But when AI does begin to scale, its effects are likely to be nonlinear.
As business teams move faster—producing more contracts, more content, more initiatives, and more risk—the need for legal involvement is likely to rise as well. At the same time, AI introduces new categories of work, including:
These are all tasks that require experienced human judgment.
What distinguishes this moment from past technology shifts is not just AI’s potential impact, but the uncertainty surrounding its timing, pace, and ultimate impact. As a result, leaders are being asked to make expensive and highly consequential decisions in an environment where tools are evolving rapidly, regulatory frameworks are still forming, client and business expectations are shifting, and long-term operating models remain unclear.
For legal leaders responsible for staffing decisions, this uncertainty has real consequences.
In periods like this, when demand may rise, but the timing and magnitude of that increase are unclear, legal organizations face difficult staffing choices and are often focused on preserving flexibility as they plan for an uncertain future. Large, fixed-cost commitments carry real risk, while waiting too long can leave teams stretched if demand accelerates.
In the context of AI, that tension is especially relevant. While the direction of change appears clear, the pace is not.
In practical terms, what many organizations need in moments like this is a form of leverage—not leverage in the sense of doing more with less, but leverage as flexibility in how capacity is added and managed.
Flexible legal talent—particularly experienced contract attorneys serving in interim or project-based roles requiring meaningful practice experience, business judgment, and emotional intelligence—can be a powerful form of leverage. It allows teams to absorb increases in workload, pilot new tools, and maintain service levels without committing prematurely to permanent headcount or long-term cost structures. It also creates breathing room by freeing up time and attention that can be invested in learning, experimentation, and adjustment.
Seen this way, flexible staffing is not a substitute for long-term planning. It is a way of buying time and information.
This approach is not about predicting the future with certainty. As Yogi Berra famously observed, it is difficult to make predictions—especially about the future. Preserving flexibility allows organizations to respond intelligently as the future becomes clearer.
We have not yet seen AI’s full impact on legal demand. We’re still in very early stages. But history suggests that when efficiency increases, activity follows. Legal leaders who recognize this pattern early will be better positioned to manage the transition.
The question is not whether AI will change legal work—it will. The more important question is whether organizations are prepared for the possibility that demand rises before it falls, if it falls at all.
In that environment, organizations that preserve flexibility, invest in human judgment, and retain the capacity to adapt as the future takes shape will be better positioned to navigate the transition.
Whether you're an attorney or legal ops executive looking for legal talent to assist your team or you’re a legal professional looking for a substantive yet flexible role, let us find a solution to meet your needs.