Is AI coming for your practice?

Law360 Canada (April 7, 2026, 10:32 AM EDT) --

Norm Bowley

It keeps you up at night, doesn’t it? Will artificial intelligence take over much of the practice of law as we know it? In particular, what about yours?

The answer is yes, and no. The inescapable truth is that AI is here, it’s pervasive and it’s getting better every day. You can’t hide. But you can adapt, and even thrive.

Those of us who are old enough remember dictaphones, steno pools and an IBM Selectric on every desk. And ashtrays. Carbon paper, whiteout, Gestetners, “one-write” accounting systems and shorthand. And then a few brave souls bought their first desktop computers with green or amber screens, and we’ve never looked back. Need I say more?

All legal technology to date has been about doing more with less, and to a lesser degree, doing better with less, and at a lower cost. Dicta Typists, once ubiquitous, are no longer to be found. And when was the last time you spent a morning in the law library? Accept it, technology has upended nearly every facet of our professional lives.

The trend to date is that we can do things faster, more efficiently, at lower cost and (by and large) better. But technology has not come for your job. Until now.

To understand whether your job is on the line or not, one needs to appreciate the essential bifurcation of the profession, a duality that is seen across all the professions and throughout commerce: commodity work vs. bespoke work.

McDonald’s is a perfect example of a commodity practice: everything systematized and analyzed to the penny, and all staff, every single cheery, smiling one of them, thoroughly trained to follow an exact script. The burger I get in Welland will be exactly the same as the one I had in Arnprior. And some areas of law are just like that.

A well-managed real estate practice and a top-flight personal injury firm are not unlike McDonald's, and often just as profitable. Ninety-five per cent of the work is replicable from file to file, and 95 per cent of it can and will be done by artificial intelligence. It’s the five per cent that provides the clue.

The five per cent is the “bespoke” side of the practice, the piece that requires you to go for a walk and throw crumbs to the pigeons and stare out over the river while something important but troubling churns in your subconscious, ideas taking shape, until you “get it.” This is the stuff that makes lawyers different from machines, this business of wrestling with troublesome and perplexing life puzzles that are not amenable to pure logic, at least initially.

We call this “instinct” or “intuition.” The greats of every profession possess this stuff in spades, and all of us can develop our artistry. This is something very, very human, something that works deep within our psyches. We enter the profession with a working ability, and if we’re lucky, refine and strengthen this deeply personal gift every day.

Whether you call that your instinct, your soul, your subconscious or whatever, it’s what makes lawyers lawyers. Artificial intelligence doesn’t yet possess that instinct, and who knows when it will. AI is not coming for the most important part of our jobs. And also, quite frankly, the most interesting and the best part.

At the same time, though, there will be champions among the survivors, and those who do best will be those who live deeply in their professional instincts, but also who take full advantage of everything AI has to offer. In the legal cockpit, you are the pilot and AI is the copilot. If you let AI draft your complex pleadings, you’re an idiot. If you let AI critique your pleadings for gaps, overlaps and contradictions, you’re making proper use.

AI can read and review your opponent’s entire trial brief in seconds, and point out logical gaps and sketchy authority. Without doubt, AI will also miss some things and hallucinate about others, but that will become less and less frequent. AI’s output should always be taken with a grain of salt, but so should the opinion of the lawyer in the next office. At the end of the day, it’s your licence and your reputation.

Will artificial intelligence take away your job? Perhaps, but not inevitably. The profession will almost certainly decline in terms of absolute numbers, and considerable work will probably get off-boarded to specialty enterprises. The title insurance “crisis” of the 1990s may well revisit in a more competitive form, and in any event it’s almost inevitable that consumer and political pressure will drive the unit price of a deal down to a point where almost all of it has to be done with AI, whether in our offices or elsewhere. With foresight and adaptability, lawyers can stay in the driver’s seat, and with really smart use of AI, stay profitable. Laggards, however, will be crushed.

Interestingly, it’s likely that the highest earners currently will be most likely to survive. Why? Well, they charge what they do because they can. Clients need their wisdom, judgment and instincts to get them out of trouble, keep them out of trouble or plan better futures, as in a well tax-planned corporate reorg. These things are not immediately replicable by AI and will continue to be needed. In fact, these are areas where AI will sharply enhance your reputation-building work, making you all the more valuable.

If you’re not in the high-earner category, AI can in fact get you there, if you use it to automate your sweat-of-the-brow activities and let it support your really good stuff, with you becoming the thinker, the analyst and the problem solver you dreamed you’d be when you started law school.

Anyone who sleepwalks into the AI future will have their lunch eaten if they continue to grind out commodity work by hand. If you wrap your head around what you actually do best, and love, and embrace AI’s ability to leverage you, you can have whatever you’d like for lunch.

Next steps for the terrified? Just start using AI at home, for personal tasks, hobbies, whatever. Get it to create a notification a week out for birthdays in your contacts list. At the office, get it to critique letters or create a diagram to graphically represent the various options you’re asking a client to consider. Your ideas, AI does the heavy lifting and the troubleshooting, then you review the review. You’re the boss, it’s the servant, but one very smart servant.

Like Dylan Thomas, we can “rage, rage against the dying of the light” or we can embrace the liberation to do what we do best.

Norm Bowley practised law in Ottawa for 37 years. Before retiring, his practice focused on high-net-worth individuals and families, particularly entrepreneurs and professionals. In “retirement,” Norm writes extensively, speaks, coaches and consults, and if there’s any spare time, maintains a bit of acreage on the Tay River. His upcoming book, The Lawyer and the Dropouts: Stunning insights about professional success and happiness, is expected later in 2026.

The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, Law360 Canada, LexisNexis Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

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