The Lawyer of (Not the Future, but) Now (Part II)

Table of Contents

• Ability to Communicate/Present, Not Just to Document

• Understanding Clients’ Backgrounds and Contexts

• Mapping Touchpoints While Not Overlying on Them

• Grasping and Delivering a Documentation Ecosystem

This is Part II of a two-part article, with Part I available here. Part I of this article looked at some of the skills directly related to AI that the “lawyer of now” must develop.  This Part II seeks to think through other skills and perspectives - those needed to thrive alongside the knock-on effects of AI adoption, as opposed to those relating to the use of AI itself.

Ability to Communicate/Present, Not Just to Document

The lawyer of the future - of now - must be able to communicate and present effectively.  As technical skills like drafting become more commoditized by AI, the value of a lawyer, if it is to persist, moves “up the stack” toward the ability to communicate what those deployed technical skills actually will accomplish and/or to inject intelligence earlier in the process of developing a deal, product, etc., at the business decision-making level.  

In other words, the job of expert lawyers cannot hinge solely on technical acumen deployed to “paper” a deal or “approve” a product.  Instead, they must be able to help guide the client’s decision-making before the drafting or final product-approval phase.  If the lawyer cannot contribute - and differentiate - by effective communication and presentation (as opposed to just documentation) there, then it will be incredibly hard to differentiate by way of the downstream tasks that AI can largely handle, and the lawyer will be perceived as merely a final box to check, not a creative partner.

The upshot, then, is that much of the attorney work-product that has historically stood on its own as “valuable” merely by virtue of existing may no longer hold that distinction, without more.  It will be seen as only an artifact or distillation (that AI can mostly produce) of judgement and risk assessment, and will not “count” as the presentation/product/service worth paying for.  Consequently, lawyers will have to become even more adept at communicating to their clients on business terms - in slide decks, in KPIs, in lawyer-made product demos and in discussions of financial impact around conference tables, to name a few.  

These are among the “artifacts” in which value will either exist or not, once it has been drained from the act of drafting or of first-pass reviewing documents or product specs.  If lawyers cannot gain access into and sway in these situations, there will be nothing left with which to fill the time that AI has now freed up for them.

Understanding Clients’ Backgrounds and Contexts

Another knock-on effect of lawyers having to live higher up the value-add chain is that they will increasingly need to interact with clients, internal and external, on issues that go beyond legal into business thinking and strategy.  This means understanding (i) that recipients of lawyers’ advice are no longer looking solely for legal advice and (ii) how to communicate with clients who are therefore not indexing only on legal considerations.

This, in turn, means understanding clients’ backgrounds and the challenges they’re facing.  Is the client a lawyer-turned-business-leader?  If so, the lawyer may be able to appeal to that person’s legal sense but probably cannot rely on it solely, as they have deliberately chosen to pivot away from legal practice, which means they’ve consciously adopted a different way of thinking and, very importantly, different lenses through which to view risk.  

In other words, if the client has a background with which the lawyer thinks they are familiar, they still cannot make assumptions about what that means about the client’s worldview.  And if the client does not, the lawyer has to research and consider how they think, in order to communicate with them effectively.  

For instance, is the client in build-mode, in maintenance-mode or in a risk-triage situation?  The answer to that question may determine what type of advice they’re receptive to, how the lawyer must message and contextualize advice and how to advise when it comes to non-legal matters.  This advice may be based on the lawyer’s broader knowledge of the client’s market or deep knowledge of their legal posture and documentation.  But either way, the lawyer must package it bespoke for the client’s consumption at this particular moment.

Mapping Touchpoints While Not Overrelying on Them

Clients, internal and external, relying on AI to begin to (or fully) serve their legal needs runs the risk that lawyers fall out of the loop, creating risk for the client and negative implications for the lawyer’s raison d’etre.  Consequently, lawyers must more proactively seek touchpoints to remain relevant to the businesses and clients they serve.  That is, lawyers must find points of ingress higher up the value-chain - only after that does an understanding of the client and the ability to communicate on non-legal issues matter.

That can certainly mean formally agreed-to check-ins or gates where legal must be involved.  This is probably easier to “enforce” in an in-house setting, but even then it may be challenging, given internal clients’ desire for speed and sometimes-view of legal as red-tape.  For law firms, the resistance here may be even more significant, given that every check-in brings with it a bill.  

All this is to say, formal legal touchpoints around a given process are useful as one lever, but they likely cannot be relied upon as the only means of keeping lawyers deeply integrated into clients’ business processes.  To accomplish that, the lawyer needs to provide value in the ways discussed in the preceding two sections, to incentivize clients to loop them in - proactively delivering relevant advice without being asked (and possibly off-the-clock), surfacing key market insights that depend on the lawyer’s broader market visibility, etc.  Without that, the clients’ perceived (if not real) need for touchpoints dries up, leaving both parties worse off.

Grasping and Delivering a Documentation Ecosystem

Another way to provide that value is to counter the idea that legal drafting has now been “solved”.  And doing so is easier in the context of documentation ecosystems, as opposed to single documents.  It is one thing for a client to be able to generate a single legal document via AI, without looping in lawyers - it is another thing for the client to generate a complex set of interlocking documents to cover a more complicated scenario, and that is precisely what so much of legal work is.

Helping clients to understand this by driving value through astutely structuring document ecosystems, making them efficient, clear-if-not-simple and “self-updating” to the extent possible (e.g., an update to one document within a package does not trigger a string of domino-effect required manual updates but instead cascades into the other connected documents via incorporation by reference) - these are the ways in which the lawyer’s value, even when limited to the realm of drafting, is more acutely felt.  This is where legal drafting shifts from “typing” to “architecture”, and that, along with the judgement and experience that drive it, is what is harder to replicate.  

This requires an analog to the skill/mindset discussed in Part I of this article under the section, “Mapping the Workday’s Atomic Units; Systems Thinking”: the ability to break down a system of legal requirements into its constituent parts and map them out as cleanly as possible in the form of legal documents.  This means the ability to think beyond the four corners of a document and to conceptualize what a transaction, workflow or product is attempting to solve for, and then creating and arranging the puzzle pieces as effectively as possible.  This is a very different skill-set than merely drafting documents, and that is why it has a wider moat than does drafting when it comes to the AI era.  

The goal of this two-part article has not been to prescribe an exhaustive list of critical lawyer skills for the AI era, but instead to begin flagging potential areas where lawyers can excel alongside AI.  Learning AI means experimenting with it, but the same is true for learning how to serve clients going forward.  Some of the discussed skill-sets were not as critical for lawyers previously, but leveraging them and figuring out how to expand beyond the traditional value-levers of the legal profession will be a differentiating factor going forward.

Ten Manor Advisory LLC is not affiliated with, controlled by or in control of any other business or entity.