[gregjor]

Most lawyers don't do trial work. They put together boilerplate contracts, read through discovery documents and highlight and summarize, pretty rote stuff. Trial lawyers probably don't have to worry for now, but a lawyer specializing in, say, filing bankruptcies (already almost completely automated without LLMs), or filing disability claims, or drafting contracts, leases, etc. -- the vast majority of the output of the legal profession -- may get run over by LLMs.

Nolo Press kind of got there decades ago, with books about legal procedures and tear-out fill-in-the-blanks forms sold in bookstores. No LLM needed, it made the law accessible to a lot of people. Plenty of areas of routine law get handled by automation or outsourcing to non-lawyers already. Think about a residential lease, basically a word processing template with the blanks filled in by software.

Look at tax preparation to see where at least some large piece of legal work will probably go. A vanishingly small number of people need a tax attorney. Most people can use software, or go to an H&R Block office or pay an accountant to prepare their taxes, with "pro" versions of the same software. Similar software already exists for things like bankruptcy, divorce, contracts, residential and commercial leases, on and on. The legal profession is already heavily reliant on computer software. Whether LLMs will make that software better or not, I don't know.