'AI Lawyer' Roles Are Booming, but How Long Will Demand Last?

'AI Lawyer' Roles Are Booming, but How Long Will Demand Last?

AI expertise may be creating new legal roles today, but the longer-term shift is toward AI fluency becoming part of the baseline skill set for legal professionals.

AI-focused legal roles are growing quickly, but the bigger question is whether “AI lawyer” remains a distinct specialty or whether those skills simply become expected across the profession. As AI tools become more deeply embedded in legal workflows, firms and corporate legal departments are increasingly looking for professionals who can pair strong legal experience with the ability to work effectively with AI.

That shift is at the center of “‘AI Lawyer’ Roles Are Booming, but How Long Will Demand Last?”, a new Legaltech News / Law.com article featuring insight from our Founder and CEO, Jared Coseglia, on how AI is reshaping legal hiring and why AI-enabled talent is likely to become the standard for full-time legal teams.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: “‘AI Lawyer’ Roles Are Booming, but How Long Will Demand Last?”

LAW.COM ARTICLE:

While the legal industry's embrace of generative artificial intelligence may have created strong job prospects for attorneys with a heavy focus on AI, the future of the niche is cloudier. It is unclear whether roles specifically focused on AI issues will continue to grow, or whether these responsibilities will instead be subsumed into broader corporate and transactional roles.

Hard to Define

“AI lawyer” is less a specific job title than an umbrella category used to refer to attorneys whose substantive focus is on developing and overseeing AI tools and policies, which contributes to the challenge of making broad predictions about the group.
Jonathan Broder, founder and managing partner of legal recruitment agency Vortex Legal, told Law.com that, beyond legal engineers, lawyers focused on AI can include attorneys who advise clients on AI-related matters, attorneys who deploy AI tools in due diligence processes, and product counsel (in-house attorneys who advise on a variety of issues across the product development life cycle).

In addition to the broad range of functions, the level of technical skill required in these roles can vary widely.

“If [they’re] working at a law firm as an attorney billing clients, then advising on AI can relate to policies like Acceptable Use Policies and risk management issues,” Broder noted. He added that the relevant skills required for this sort of advisory work are generally not technical, meaning “any lawyer familiar with the space could pick it up.”

Similarly, legal engineering jobs often do not require specific technical skills on the front end, focusing instead on detailed knowledge of the workflows and processes employers are trying to augment or automate with AI.

Conversely, advising clients on which tools they should implement, or working directly on developing underlying AI tools, can require more hard technical skills. Broder noted these are relatively scarce among attorneys and generally concentrated in technical practices like intellectual property or in non-client-facing roles.

Where Will the Jobs Be?

The ease of entry into some categories can be a bit of a two-edged sword; attorneys have more opportunity on the front end, but less ability to avoid competition and commoditization in the long run. While product counsel need a detailed understanding of how AI systems work to help development teams avoid legal risk, the same may not be true for law firm attorneys advising clients on use policies and governance frameworks.
The ability of attorneys to pick up the skills required to advise on many AI topics leads some experts to predict a gradual dissipation in demand for lawyers who counsel specifically on AI-related issues.

Epiq Vice President Rebekah Stafford, who oversees flexible legal talent offering Epiq Counsel, told Law.com when Epiq bought Tenor Legal that she had recently seen a high level of need for lawyers focused on AI. However, she added that she expects demand for such “AI lawyers” to dissipate as the skills required to advise on AI become more broadly diffused.

“Transactional lawyers and corporate lawyers are going to need to understand how AI plugs into the whole ecosystem that they're working with, as opposed to having [a] niche, really niche-'Oh, I am just an AI lawyer,’” she said, describing it as “a skill that just has to be part of your toolbox in general as a competent, effective in-house counsel.”

Jared Coseglia, founder and CEO of TruLegal, said the longer-term trend is toward law firms and in-house teams hiring full-time employees who are or can easily become competent at leveraging AI-powered tools, supplementing with contract workers with expertise in legal or technological niches as needed.

However, Coseglia added that the lack of a robust regulatory framework around AI tools distinguishes the area from the well-developed body of privacy law, making it unlikely to offer as many specific roles as are available for privacy.

“Regulation is what drove demand, then commoditization, in both e-discovery [and] then privacy,” he said. “AI is nowhere near the adoption or regulation level as other niche legal areas.”

Given the uncertainty over future demand for expertise on regulatory and risk management issues related to AI, lawyers may be better served focusing on developing competence using AI than focusing on it as a substantive area of law.

“Any attorneys who do not have skill sets related to AI will slowly become contract workers, or un- [or] underemployed,” Coseglia said. “Legal will be focused on hiring [full-time employees] who are AI-enabled.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: “‘AI Lawyer’ Roles Are Booming, but How Long Will Demand Last?”

About TruLegal

TruLegal (formerly TRU Staffing Partners) is an award-winning global leader in delivering bespoke AI-enabled talent solutions for modern legal teams. With a network of relationships reaching over 100,000 legal professionals across 75+ countries, TruLegal has successfully placed thousands of attorneys, legal operations, litigation & eDiscovery, data privacy, cybersecurity and other legal professionals who focus on the intersection of technology and the law. For over fifteen years, TruLegal has provided flexible contract talent, direct hire contingency staffing, and executive level search services to the Fortune 1000, AmLaw 200, and the community of providers that support the legal industry.

Contact:
TruLegal
marketing@trulegal.ai