They are at risk; the ones that use AI will remove the ones that don’t in the end. The average lawyer does very little already; last week I had some papers that I needed to be checked legally; gpt4 found some issues that the expensive lawyer overlooked. Not big issues but issues. And this document was not in English either. It explained the issues in English, it provided a lot of text which the lawyer did not. But they did spend (assuming they didn’t lie) 3 hours and some minutes on them; if they can do this with AI in 15-30 minutes, which they can (it is enough time to recognise if it’s hallucinating), then they can put 3-4 lawyers out of a job by lowering prices. And that’s just using gpt as tool, not as the primary driver; just to speed up the work.

I don’t think it would destroy jobs for anything high profile (including programmers), but the grunts is a different story. If the secretary or, for instance, nurse, can feed through info and the ‘head’ lawyer/doctor of the practice only has to sign off on the result, the license is not an issue.

Not there yet, but can’t see this as avoidable anymore.

I agree and disagree.

Law firms make money, like any professional services firm, by billing hours. Fewer billable hours means less income for the partners. So while it's the low hanging fruit technically, it will resist as long as possible. It will be clients saying no to paying $250-$500 an hour for work that AI could do better and for free that will force the issue. I foresee more legal work moving in-house.

Medicine is a different beast. There's an acute shortage and a different incentive model (not run as partnerships). Big hospital/medical/insurance firms will invest most heavily in AI.