In Reply to: AI is already living up to the hype posted by amadbruin on August 23, 2026 at 10:37:30
I haven't paid attention to it in a while, but.....
A while back, the CA Bar was pushing for legislation that would empower paralegal's to do a lot more stuff that would currently be considered Unauthorized Practice of the Law. Maybe even create a new certified role in addition to paralegals. But, they would not be lawyers, would not have gone to law school. And, as far as I can tell, they wouldn't need any more legal training than a paralegal. (No disrespect to paralegals - it's a different skill set and different kind of intelligence/analysis from lawyering. From what I can tell, most lawyers would be terrible paralegals).
The theory was that with the advent of AI (and this was like 5 years ago that I was reading this), paralegals can feed the "facts" into a laptop and the cloud will generate most of the necessary analysis. There was some company, or consortium of companies, that was pushing the legislature and the bar to enact legislation to enable this.
I don't know where that stands. But, being a lawyer is the lasssssst career path I'd point a young person toward right now.
I have a step-relative that had a $1000/hr(!) divorce attorney. As the well started running dry, my step-rellie says that she started drafting her own motions using AI and giving it to the attorney to review. She's very smart, a former VP of a company you've heard of, but I find that hard to believe.