Appetite for Destruction: Will Generative AI Eat Lawyers Alive?
Where I explore how AI is not just another efficiency booster, but may be a value-chain predator that could swallow the legal profession whole
Welcome back, legal rebels and visionary thinkers! Today’s piece takes us deep into the belly of the beast, quite literally. We’re exploring how AI isn’t just another tool lawyers can keep safely contained in their tech toolbox, but rather a voracious meta-technology poised to devour entire value chains and reshape the very foundations of the legal profession. 🦾⚖️
Drawing on provocative insights from Yuval Noah Harari, Nick Bostrom, and Andy Kessler’s aptly titled Eat People, we’re confronting some hard truths: What if the lawyer of tomorrow is less about crafting clever briefs and more about managing the powerful intelligence systems that can outperform humans at nearly every turn? Buckle up, this exploration will challenge everything you thought you knew about your future in law. Let’s dive in!
This substack, LawDroid Manifesto, is here to keep you in the loop about the intersection of AI and the law. Please share this article with your friends and colleagues and remember to tell me what you think in the comments below.
Picture a team of construction workers assembling a high-rise office building in the middle of a bustling city. Each person on-site has a role: carpenters, electricians, plumbers, foremen, architects, project managers. Now imagine if, one day, you discover a new team member, some advanced machine, that doesn’t just swing hammers faster or wire circuits more efficiently, but can also read blueprints, organize schedules, and even design new structural approaches on the fly. Suddenly, this device isn’t just another tool in the toolkit; it’s something that can replace or reshape the entire end-to-end process of building. It’s a meta-technology that can transcend traditional roles and devour the entire value chain.
This, in essence, is the promise (and threat) of Artificial Intelligence.
If this sounds interesting to you, please read on…
A Larger-Than-Life Disruption
When we think of technology, discrete tools often come to mind: the telephone, the assembly line, the personal computer. Each has changed the nature of specific tasks: typewriters mechanized handwriting, email replaced some forms of communication, spreadsheets automated calculations. But each tool generally stayed in its lane. A typewriter didn’t generate original content on its own. Email required a human to draft the message. Spreadsheets can’t interpret complicated legal or strategic questions without someone at the helm.
AI is different. Unlike earlier tools, AI isn’t merely automating rote work; it’s capable of judgment, creativity, and strategic planning, so-called “higher-level” endeavors once reserved for lawyers, project managers, and executives. AI can do background research, interpret statutes, or produce briefs once requiring the intellect of a trained lawyer. Calling AI a mere “technology” undersells its transformative potential. It’s more accurate to describe AI as a meta-technology because it not only creates a solution for a task (for example, automating document generation), but a solution for the creation of solutions (for example, vibe coding), and can consume entire workflows and even spawn new ones unexpectedly.
This notion of a technology that does more than just “improve” existing workflows is reminiscent of Andy Kessler’s argument in Eat People, where he discusses how certain innovations essentially devour inefficiencies and labor throughout the production chain. Rather than just making something a bit faster or cheaper, these disruptive leaps can eradicate entire job categories and reconfigure industries. AI, with its capacity to perform both “grunt work” and “high-level” tasks, is shaping up to be precisely that kind of devourer.
Why Jevons’ Paradox Falls Short
Economists often invoke Jevons’ paradox in technology discussions. Jevons’ paradox says that as a resource (like coal) becomes cheaper to use, its overall consumption grows. An improved engine making coal use more efficient, for instance, leads manufacturers to ramp up production, ironically leading to more total coal use.
Tech commentators sometimes extend this logic to AI, suggesting that lawyers, freed from grunt work, will move into higher-value tasks. The implicit assumption is that humans remain the bottleneck for the highest-level thinking, so making one layer cheaper or more efficient simply increases demand for the entire stack. It also assumes an ever-expanding supply of clients and work to be done.
But that assumption fails when AI doesn’t just do the grunt work, but also the higher-value thinking itself. If AI can devour every tier of the production chain (research, legal argumentation, even strategic judgment), then we’re no longer dealing with “cheaper coal.” We’re dealing with an entirely new fuel paradigm, where the fuel can not only power the engine, but perform the work the engine is to undertake as well. Jevons’ paradox presupposes that humans are still the limiting or critical resource; if that’s no longer true, the paradox crumbles.
Andy Kessler’s perspective in Eat People underscores this point: technologies that “eat” entire layers of labor don’t merely enhance existing workflows; they replace them. When a meta-technology arises, the fundamental rules of supply and demand can dramatically shift, because the labor itself may no longer be a scarce resource, AI can replicate and scale knowledge-based tasks at lightning speed.
“Freeing Up Lawyers” or “Sidelining Lawyers”?
We’ve all heard the talking points: “AI will free up our lawyers to engage in more creative problem-solving!” or “Now associates can focus on complex analysis rather than sifting through discovery!” On the surface, this has a rosy sheen. But the uncomfortable reality is that there might not be as much “creative problem-solving” left in the same sense that human lawyers traditionally performed it.
It’s as if your entire kitchen staff (dishwasher, sous chef, head chef) were replaced by a hyper-advanced system that can plan menus, chop, season, cook, plate, and clean up. Saying “We can now focus on the creative aspects of cooking!” might fall flat when the new AI-driven “staff” can also invent fresh recipes and flavor combinations you’d never imagine. So where does the human chef add value? Possibly in overseeing the system, or providing a personal brand. But it’s no longer a simple, linear shift where humans climb up the chain; the chain itself can be run end-to-end by a single meta-technology.
Kessler’s framing in Eat People is clear that in industries where labor is the biggest expense, technologies that annihilate manual or even knowledge-labor steps will dominate. Applied to the legal field, if AI can do most, if not all, of the traditional lawyering tasks, there’s scant room for incremental “value-add” by humans who merely want to shift one rung up the ladder.
Echoes of Harari, Bostrom, and Kessler
Yuval Noah Harari has warned that AI could break the traditional story legitimizing human authority. Historically, we’ve maintained power by our unique capacity for judgment, creativity, and moral reasoning. We adapted to trains, electricity, the internet, always with humans staying firmly in control. Yet, if AI can match or surpass us in reasoning and pattern recognition, what remains for us to do?
Nick Bostrom’s work on superintelligence amplifies this concern: once AI is capable enough to recursively improve itself, the speed and scale of its impact can exceed our expectations exponentially.
Andy Kessler’s Eat People brings a complementary, market-driven lens: if a meta-technology emerges that can slice out inefficiencies and labor costs at scale, it will. Clients will demand it, and industries will restructure around it. Where Harari and Bostrom emphasize existential and ethical challenges, Kessler underscores the economic inevitability of such disruptions.
Thus, we don’t need a sci-fi scenario of evil AI overlords or apocalyptic demise to see how the legal profession might be upended. If AI can replace both grunt work and strategic work, the old model of “just upskill to a higher rung” may ring hollow, there might be no rung left to climb onto.
Seeing the Whole Elephant
The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions are different from each other. The blind men, from their different perspectives, cannot “see the whole elephant.”
Many lawyers see AI as a faster research assistant, a better discovery tool, or a tireless associate. Each vantage point catches a glimpse of the elephant, but misses the bigger picture: the elephant is a formidable creature. AI can, and likely will, perform a variety of tasks that span the entire workflow, from intake to final arguments. In the language of Eat People, it doesn’t just nibble around the edges; it feasts on entire categories of labor if and when it’s more cost-effective to do so.
Planning for Obsolescence
This isn’t about resisting AI adoption. If a solution can do something better, faster, and cheaper, the market (and clients) will demand it. The real question is whether lawyers simply become managers of AI output (overseeing, quality-controlling, stepping in for ethical or empathetic tasks) or if the industry will need far fewer lawyers overall.
In Eat People, Kessler notes that technology’s relentless efficiency compels companies to adapt or die. For lawyers, “embracing obsolescence” might be the key phrase. Will you proactively steer AI’s integration, or be swept aside by competitors who do? Be the lawyer who shuns AI, or be the lawyer who uses AI to outperform luddite lawyers? But, if AI can now outperform both, what’s the point??
Embracing a New Value Proposition
Ask any lawyer why they pursued law, and you might hear about justice, problem-solving, and making a meaningful difference. Ironically, these very human-centric motivations could be the key differentiators in the AI era. Even the most advanced AI can’t replicate genuine human empathy or moral or monetary accountability. It can simulate these qualities, but there’s a real difference between a program’s simulation of compassion and a lived human experience.
Thus, the “higher-value” tasks in a post-AI legal landscape might not be more complex briefs or deeper research. They may lie in forging real human connections, shaping public policy, and championing social or ethical causes that transcend pure logic. But we shouldn’t assume this will be an easy or orderly transition. Market forces prize cost savings and efficiency, exactly what AI delivers in droves. And, even if AI leaves lawyers to be empathetic counselors, not all lawyers will be up to the task. An old lawyer joke is: “The practice of law would be wonderful.. if it weren’t for the clients.” Some lawyers prefer professional distance to client empathy.
Closing Thoughts
So what now, and what does this mean for lawyers who’ve long been indispensable knowledge workers? The bottom line is that AI isn’t confined to one segment of the value chain; it’s a shape-shifting meta-technology capable of migrating into any segment of knowledge work, including those once thought exclusively human.
For lawyers, the conversation shouldn’t be just about using AI to stay competitive; it should be about transforming the profession entirely. We need to redefine the core purpose of human lawyers, emphasizing contributions that AI can’t easily absorb, like ethical decision-making, empathy, relationship-building, and the broader human compass guiding the practice of law.
Andy Kessler’s Eat People delivers a stark market reality check: if something can be automated or replaced, it will be. Our role, then, is to anticipate this inevitability and decide how to harness AI’s power without becoming collateral damage in its path. That means being honest that AI can, and likely will, eat broad swaths of the traditional legal workflow, and it will do so with unprecedented speed.
In the end, tomorrow’s lawyer might look drastically different from today’s. If we acknowledge AI’s breadth and depth as a devourer of inefficiencies, and sometimes entire job functions, then we can pivot with intention and integrity, rather than simply reacting to events as they unfold.
By the way, as a LawDroid Manifesto premium subscriber, you would get access to exclusive toolkits, like the Missing Manual: OpenAI Operator, coming out next month…
With these premium toolkits, you not only learn about the latest AI innovations and news items, but you get the playbook for how to use them to your advantage.
If you want to be at the front of the line to get first access to helpful guides like this, and have the inside track to use AI as a force multiplier in your work, upgrade to become a premium LawDroid Manifesto subscriber today!
I look forward to seeing you on the inside. ;)
Cheers,
Tom Martin
CEO and Founder, LawDroid