The Shrinking Ladder of Expertise: What Is Left For Us When AI Can Do It Better?
Where I explore how AI reshapes professional hierarchies, challenges our identities, and invites us to rediscover what makes our work, and ourselves, irreplaceable
Welcome back, thoughtful practitioners and fellow travelers on this professional journey! 📚⚖️ Today we're examining the shifting map where AI capabilities are redrawing the boundaries of expertise we once took for granted. As we watch tasks that required years of training become automated, we're confronting important questions about our value and purpose.
Join me as we explore not just what tasks remain "ours," but how this technological revolution might actually clarify what makes our human contribution truly irreplaceable. Perhaps in losing some rungs on our ladder of expertise, we're finding clearer paths to what matters most.
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.
When I was a junior attorney at the Directors Guild of America, I dreaded one part of my day. It wasn’t writing briefs or preparing for negotiations, it was delegating. I felt uneasy handing off tasks to administrative staff: copying documents, stapling, indexing, collating them into perfectly color-coded folders, and dropping them off in tidy packages. The little voice in my head would whisper: You should be doing this yourself. I was the first in my family to attend law school, let alone university. My working class upbringing filled me with guilt to make work for others I could do myself.
It was Elliott Williams, my boss at the Guild, who set me straight. Elliott was an old school craftsman of words, a true legal artisan. He was a gifted storyteller, known for weaving legal arguments into a compelling narrative and as a tough negotiator. But his greatest gift to me came in the form of a single piece of advice about delegation.
Elliott pointed out that delegation isn’t about pawning off “lesser work” on people beneath you. It’s about recognizing that there are tasks that only you, with your years of training and specialized knowledge, are well positioned to do. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle the admin tasks; it was that the administrative assistant couldn’t do my job in the same way I could. Their role required a different kind of expertise: managing office logistics, coordinating calendars, ensuring the entire legal department ran like a well-oiled machine. My role was different, requiring a specialized education and deep familiarity with legal argumentation and strategy.
Only then did I stop seeing delegation as a classist divide (that I wanted no part of) and start seeing it as a wise division of labor. It wasn’t about rank or moral judgment; it was about skill, discipline, education, and effort for all parties involved. The value I added to the organization was as an attorney, not a copy clerk, because that would create the most value from the use of my time because I had been through the discipline of law school, the bar exam, and the hours spent refining legal writing.
Now, I’m reminded of Elliott’s delegation advice nearly every day, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. Suddenly, tasks once seen as requiring advanced training are being handed off to AI applications that can do everything from drafting contracts to analyzing case law at lightning speed. This isn’t about handing someone a stack of documents to copy; it’s about handing intellectual tasks to machines that can replicate, and sometimes surpass, the human capacity for research and logic.
It begs the question: What is left for us to do?
The Great Reversal: AI as the Expert
Part of what made me feel guilty about delegating tasks to an administrative assistant was my underlying assumption that “if I can do it, I should.” This guilt derived from a sense of pride and independence, something many of us share. But what happens when AI starts doing what we can’t do, at least not as quickly or efficiently?
Once, there was a clear hierarchy: lawyers, with specialized knowledge, handled sophisticated tasks; administrators took on the support duties. Today, AI challenges that simple order. We might find ourselves delegating not only the scanning, stapling, and collating of documents but also the initial drafting of briefs or the creation of first-pass strategies for a negotiation. It’s disconcerting if you’ve built your identity around your ability to handle these once-unassailable intellectual tasks.
Yet, perhaps paradoxically, we can think of AI’s entry into these realms as a kind of democratizing force. Yes, it can perform labor once reserved for the specialized, but that also means more people can participate at a higher level. Just as the internet allowed anyone with a connection to engage with databases once restricted to libraries or specialized research centers, AI can put advanced analytical tools in the hands of someone who’s never stepped foot in a law school.
The Ladder of Expertise
We can view the evolution of labor through the metaphor of a ladder. At first, tasks on the lower rungs, like basic data entry or routine correspondence, were given to administrative staff or associates fresh out of school. As you climbed higher up the ladder, you encountered more complex tasks: drafting legal strategies, negotiating deals, presenting arguments in court.
What’s happening now feels like the rungs of the ladder themselves are being rearranged, or in some cases, removed entirely. AI can effortlessly jump to a rung once reserved for seasoned professionals. With AI’s ability to sift through mountains of data in seconds and spit out a coherent summary, some of the experience-based progression might become less necessary.
But does that render the human journey to mastery obsolete? One of the greatest insights psychology and philosophy offer is that knowledge is more than a set of instructions or heuristics; it’s also about understanding context and forming judgment. Michelangelo once famously said, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” Mastery, by its nature, involves a fusion of knowledge, practice, resilience, and perspective.
When an AI leaps straight to a competent draft of a legal motion, it hasn’t traveled the same road. It has no internal sense of the heartbreak of losing a case, the joy of seeing justice served, or the anxiety of hearing a judge’s gavel echo through a courtroom. That journey might seem like emotional baggage, but it also forms the intangible layers of expertise we rely on when the stakes are high. It’s also the experience that binds us together with our clients as human beings. AI’s intelligence, as advanced as it is, is missing the lived aspect of the discipline, at least for now.
The Parable of the Origami Crane
Imagine spending years studying the art of origami under a master craftsman. Each fold, each crease, tells you something about balance and precision. You learn to adapt to different types of paper and memorize intricate patterns, building muscle memory and aesthetic sense. Eventually, you can fold delicate paper cranes so perfect that they look ready to take flight.
Now imagine someone creates a “Cranebot” that can replicate these shapes at the push of a button, spitting out thousands of flawless paper cranes per hour. Does that negate your hard-won skill? No. It simply means that people who want an origami crane can have one without going through your years of training. The deeper question is: Do people still want the experience of craftsmanship? Do they still appreciate the unspoken knowledge that goes into each fold?
When it comes to law, the push-button AI might offer a preliminary draft, but the intangible qualities of interpretation, empathy, understanding, and real-world reasoning still matter. Clients want someone who isn’t just reciting legal text, outputting documents, or running data analytics. They want to feel heard, seen, and know someone has taken on the weight of their problem. They want to sense the texture of human understanding behind the advice and feel the peace of mind from knowing it is well-handled.
Embracing Our Human Core
Psychologically, we’re wired to find purpose in what we do. Viktor Frankl, in his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning, argued that human beings are ultimately driven by the search for significance. If AI keeps taking over tasks, even complex ones, one valid fear is that we might lose the sense of purpose those tasks provided.
Yet, consider the direction in which this might nudge us. Perhaps the presence of AI as a delegator for sophisticated tasks challenges us to identify and reclaim what is uniquely human. The rhetorical flourish of a closing argument, the ability to pivot in negotiation based on intangible reading of the room, or the moral and ethical compass that guides what should be done rather than what can be done, these are areas where human insight, creativity, and conscience shine.
In the early days of the industrial revolution, automation allowed us to move from rote manual labor to more specialized, creative tasks. The same principle might apply to the AI revolution. As AI takes on large portions of the intellectual heavy lifting, humans have the opportunity to channel our energy into nuanced skills: empathy, ethics, strategic vision, and emotional intelligence.
The Future of Legal Delegation
If I revisit Elliot’s advice about delegation. “You have to ask whether someone else can do what you do,” I might adapt it for the AI age: You have to ask whether a machine can replicate what you do. And if it can, what parts of your work are truly irreplaceable?
Strategic Judgment: AI can analyze data, but the strategic direction and how it will impact human beings and their response to it, especially in uncharted legal territory, may hinge on principles learned through life experience, ethical frameworks, and cultural understanding.
Personal Connection: The law, at its core, deals with human conflicts, aspirations, and relationships. Clients often choose attorneys who can listen, empathize, and convey a sense of partnership, peace of mind, and accountability.
Creative Advocacy: Great legal storytelling, like Elliot’s gift, requires empathy for the audience and an almost dramatic sense of timing. These elements aren’t so easily automated.
Moral and Ethical Considerations: Law isn’t just about winning a case. Sometimes you have to decide whether you should take a case at all. Machines can weigh data, but they can’t easily weigh conscience.
Legal professionals who excel in these areas will find that AI becomes more of a partner than a threat. Instead of spending hours combing through discovery documents or drafting repetitive motions, they can focus on what originally inspired them to become attorneys.
Closing Thoughts
The future of our work might be less about “Can I do it?” and more about “Is this the best use of my unique abilities?” A lawyer’s value doesn’t hinge on possessing knowledge that no one else can Google. It lies in the power to interpret that knowledge wisely, advocate passionately, and connect with human beings on the other end of the issue.
AI may democratize and enable tasks once out of reach for many, much as Elliott taught me that delegation democratizes tasks within an organization. But in doing so, we’re not made irrelevant; we’re challenged to ascend to higher ground and focus on our unique talents. We’re forced to ask ourselves not just what we do, but why we do it. In that rediscovery of purpose (through creativity, empathy, ethical judgment, and genuine human connection) we might just find what makes our roles, and indeed our species, indispensable in an AI-driven future.
And if ever you question your worth amid the rise of the machines, remember: The capacity to do something isn’t the same as the capacity to care about it, to find meaning in it, and to create art from it. That might be the last mile no algorithm can fully travel. After all, the real magic of law (and life) lies not only in solving problems but in crafting stories that remind us, again and again, of our shared humanity.
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Cheers,
Tom Martin
CEO and Founder, LawDroid