Opinion | AI won’t replace lawyers. It will create more of them.

Oh, splendid — AI is going to save the legal profession, or so say two people who have spent their careers building the very technology that's supposed to automate it. Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, and Richard Susskind, the man who's been predicting legal tech's revolution since dial-up, now assure us that AI won't replace lawyers — it will create *more* of them. Because nothing says 'trust us' quite like a prophet whose predictions have been panning out since the '90s.

Let's just ignore the small detail that the number of lawyers has already been going up while technology has been eating routine tasks for decades. The argument is that lower costs mean more demand, so law firms will need armies of associates to handle the influx of new clients. That's a beautiful theory, assuming clients actually pay for the work. In reality, 'more work' often means 'more unbillable hours spent fixing AI hallucinations' — and we all know how partners feel about that.

So raise a glass to the future: more lawyers, more paperwork, and the same old billing disputes, now with added existential confusion about whether the AI wrote the memo or the associate did. The legal profession is safe, apparently — safe to be buried under an avalanche of marginally cheaper legal services that nobody asked for. Cheers to progress.