Purpose Versus Task: What Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Gets Right About the Future for Lawyers
Where I borrow a framework from a $3 trillion tech company to explain why some lawyers will flourish in the age of AI while others become obsolete
Last week, a video clip of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made the rounds on social media. In it, he’s cooking outdoors, because apparently that’s what you do when you’re running an $3 trillion company, and casually dropping one of the most important frameworks for understanding professional survival in the age of AI.
“The job of a software engineer,” Huang explains, “is to solve known problems and to find new problems to solve. Coding is one of the tasks.”
He pauses to let that land.
“If your purpose is that somebody tells you what to do and you code it, you’re going to get replaced.”
Huang smiles: “This framework of purpose versus task is really good for us.”
I’ve been teaching Generative AI and the Delivery of Legal Services at Suffolk University Law School, and I’ve spent years building AI tools for lawyers through LawDroid. And I can tell you: this framework isn’t just good for software engineers. It’s essential for every lawyer who wants to remain relevant in the next decade.
If this sounds interesting to you, please read on…
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.
What is Your Purpose?
Huang’s insight cuts to the heart of what AI actually threatens and what it doesn’t.
Tasks are discrete, repeatable activities. For software engineers, that’s writing code. For lawyers, tasks include drafting contracts, reviewing documents, researching case law, preparing discovery responses, and filing motions.
Professional purpose is the reason those tasks exist in the first place. For software engineers, it’s solving problems: known ones and, crucially, undiscovered ones. For lawyers, purpose is something similar but distinct: navigating human complexity to achieve outcomes that matter.
But, too many lawyers have confused their purpose with their tasks. They believe they are the document drafter, the discovery reviewer, the motion writer. Their professional identity is wrapped up in the mechanical execution of legal work.
Those lawyers are in trouble.
The Task Trap in Legal Practice
A partner assigns an associate to draft a licensing agreement. The associate spends eight hours producing a document that follows the template, catches the obvious issues, and hits the formatting requirements. Task completed.
But did anyone ask why the client needed this agreement? What business problem were they actually trying to solve? Were there creative structures that might serve them better? Was a licensing agreement even the right approach, or would a joint venture or strategic partnership better accomplish their goals?
The task-focused lawyer drafted the document they were asked to draft. The purpose-focused lawyer might have realized the client was solving the wrong problem.
This distinction has always mattered, but AI makes it existential.
Consider what AI can already do competently: first drafts of standard contracts, legal research memos, document review, due diligence summaries, correspondence, and procedural filings. These practice of law tasks, the ones many lawyers spend the majority of their time performing, are increasingly automatable.
If your value proposition is “I draft contracts accurately,” you’re competing against tools that can produce a first draft in seconds for pennies on the dollar. You will lose that competition.
Clients Value Outcomes
Here’s what makes this even more urgent: clients have always understood this distinction better than lawyers have.
Professor Richard Susskind, who I had the privilege of interviewing on the LawDroid Manifesto Podcast, has been making this point for years: people don’t want a hammer; they want to hang a picture on the wall.
Clients don’t want a lawyer. They don’t want litigation. They don’t even want legal services. They want a resolved dispute, a completed transaction, a problem that’s no longer keeping them up at night. The lawyer was always just a means to an end: a tool, not a purpose.
Susskind uses this to argue that legal services should focus on “dispute containment” and outcome-driven solutions rather than defaulting to traditional, expensive litigation. Technology, including online courts and AI-powered tools, can now deliver the picture on the wall without requiring the traditional hammer.
According to Susskind, AI is not replacing lawyers, it’s replacing the assumption that lawyers are the only solution.
Huang’s framework shows us how lawyers should think about themselves: as problem-solvers, not task-executors. Susskind’s framework shows us how clients have always thought about lawyers: as a means to an end, not the end itself.
When you combine these perspectives, the imperative becomes crystal clear. Lawyers who define themselves by their tasks are doubly vulnerable; they’ve misunderstood both their own purpose and what their clients actually want from them.
What AI Cannot Replace
If your value proposition is fulfilling your purpose: “I solve business problems through legal structures, and I identify problems my clients don’t even know they have,” that’s a fundamentally powerful position.
Purpose-focused lawyers do things AI cannot:
They sit with a client who’s describing a business dispute and realize the real issue is a failing partnership that needs restructuring, not litigation.
They look at an M&A deal and identify the regulatory landmine nobody else spotted because they’ve been thinking about this industry for twenty years.
They tell a client not to sue when the client desperately wants to, and explain why winning would actually be losing.
They find the undiscovered problems. The risks nobody thought to assess. The opportunities hiding in complex situations.
The Great Transition
Huang makes another point that translates directly: “The more time they have to go find problems, the better off we are as a company.”
This is the optimistic case for AI in legal practice. If AI handles the mechanical tasks (the first drafts, the research compilation, the document sorting), lawyers can reallocate their time toward higher-purpose work.
Instead of spending twelve hours on document review, you spend one hour reviewing AI-flagged issues and eleven hours on client counseling, strategic planning, and relationship building.
Instead of grinding through case law research, you focus on synthesizing that research into insights that actually move the needle for your client.
This pencils out beautifully — if you have the skills to operate at that higher level.
And that’s the catch. Many lawyers have been so deep in tasks for so long that they’ve atrophied their purpose muscles. They’re out of practice at asking why they’re doing what they’re doing, creative problem-solving, and the client counseling that AI cannot replace.
Becoming Fit to Purpose
So how do lawyers make this shift?
First, start asking different questions. Before any task, ask: What problem am I actually solving? Is this the right problem? What would my client really want if they understood all their options?
Second, develop comfort with ambiguity. Tasks are clean: draft this, review that, file this. Purpose is messy. It requires sitting in uncertainty, exploring possibilities, making judgment calls without clear answers. That discomfort is where the irreplaceable value lives.
Third, invest in relationships. AI can process information, but it cannot build trust. The ability to understand what a client actually needs, often different from what they say they want, comes from deep relational knowledge that accumulates over time.
Fourth, embrace AI as a leverage tool, not a threat. Use it aggressively for tasks so you can redirect your finite attention toward purpose. Every hour AI saves you on drafting is an hour you could spend on the work only humans can do.
Fifth, find the undiscovered problems. Become the lawyer who sees around corners, who raises issues nobody else considered, who adds value through insight rather than just execution.
The Existential Choice
This shift isn’t optional, and it isn’t gradual. The task-automation wave is already here.
Every lawyer faces a choice: compete against AI on tasks you will eventually lose, or differentiate yourself by becoming fit to purpose.
Huang wouldn’t be happier if none of his engineers were coding but all of them were solving problems. I feel exactly the same way about lawyers. I would have more joy if none of us were drafting routine documents but all of us were counseling clients, navigating complexity, and finding more problems that need solving.
The lawyers who thrive will be the ones who internalize this truth: you were never a document drafter who occasionally gives advice. You were always a problem solver who occasionally drafts documents.
The task was never the point.
Closing Thoughts
The law exists because humans create conflict, humans seek resolution, and humans need guidance through complexity. That hasn’t changed.
What’s changed is the toolkit. AI gives us leverage we’ve never had before: the ability to offload mechanical work and focus on what actually matters.
But leverage is neutral. It amplifies whatever you bring to it.
If you bring task-execution skills, AI will expose their limitations. If you bring purpose-driven judgment, creativity, and wisdom, AI will multiply their impact.
Jensen Huang built a company worth trillions by understanding this purpose-task distinction for software engineers. The legal profession needs to learn it just as deeply.
The question isn’t whether AI will change legal practice. The question is whether you’ll let that change diminish you, or whether you’ll use it to become the lawyer you were always meant to be…
The one who solves problems.
The one who finds the undiscovered issues.
The one whose purpose was never the paperwork.
That’s the lawyer the world needs more of. And I believe that’s the lawyer most of us wanted to become in the first place.
Hat tip 🎩 to Richard Tromans (Artificial Lawyer) for inspiration of this article.