The AI chickens are coming home to roost: Peter Ambrose reports on an unforeseen development ruffling the feathers of the profession
If you attended a conference in 2025, you would have heard many speakers warning you that if you thought that artificial intelligence (AI) was merely a future issue, then you would be very much mistaken. However, this would often be tempered with the message that there was no need to worry because AI was not going to replace all lawyers—just those lawyers who didn’t use it.
It was comforting to learn of issues concerning hallucinations, inaccuracies and the inability of the technology to share the same breadth of experience as lawyers who’d been practising for years. The message was clear: lawyers should not be intimidated by the technology but should embrace it, because the risk it posed to legal roles was limited and currently it was better suited to summarising data and producing reports, rather than handling complex legal issues that require a combination of insights and expertise.
However, what no-one was talking about was
