They are at risk; the ones that use AI will remove the ones that don’t in the end. The average lawyer does very little already; last week I had some papers that I needed to be checked legally; gpt4 found some issues that the expensive lawyer overlooked. Not big issues but issues. And this document was not in English either. It explained the issues in English, it provided a lot of text which the lawyer did not. But they did spend (assuming they didn’t lie) 3 hours and some minutes on them; if they can do this with AI in 15-30 minutes, which they can (it is enough time to recognise if it’s hallucinating), then they can put 3-4 lawyers out of a job by lowering prices. And that’s just using gpt as tool, not as the primary driver; just to speed up the work.
I don’t think it would destroy jobs for anything high profile (including programmers), but the grunts is a different story. If the secretary or, for instance, nurse, can feed through info and the ‘head’ lawyer/doctor of the practice only has to sign off on the result, the license is not an issue.
Not there yet, but can’t see this as avoidable anymore.
