As AI absorbs the work once handed to junior lawyers, senior judgment is becoming the constraint
The story of AI in the legal profession up until now has largely been about the bottom of the pyramid: speeding up document review, research and first drafts. While this has helped improve the efficiency of many law firms, it is now having another effect. Experienced partners are becoming a bottleneck.
What AI can't replace
Erin Cowling, CEO and founder of Toronto-based Flex Legal Network, recently spoke to me about how small firms can turn AI disruption into an advantage. She has seen tech-forward small firms shift tasks typically assigned to new calls – such as timelines and first drafts of statements of claim or defence – to AI. “The associates are doing things faster with AI, but the partner still has to review it, still has to have that senior judgment,” she says. The grunt work is compressed. The judgment is not.
The disruption in workflow is hitting large firms as well. Matthew Peters, partner and national leader of transformation at McCarthy Tétrault LLP, spoke to me about what AI is actually doing inside his firm. He says he gets an email “probably every other day” from a lawyer stunned by how much a new tool has sped up their workflow, and recently watched a review that would have taken six hours to finish in one. “This is no longer something coming; this is now here,” he says. Industry-wide, Clio’s 2025 Legal Trends Report on legal AI adoption documents the same surge in use across firms of every size.
Here is the squeeze: speed for associate-level work is real, but the output still needs to be routed through a reviewer. Allison Speigel, a partner at Speigel Nichols Fox LLP in Mississauga, Ontario, whose boutique competes with Big Law on flat-fee billing, told me that even when an AI summary is “totally correct,” she still ends up “wanting to go to the documents,” because in litigation, a few words can change a case. That instinct is also a professional duty: the Law Society of Ontario’s guidance on lawyers’ AI obligations tells licensees that AI output must be independently verified by a human, not by the tool itself.
Where the next generation comes from
The harder problem is what comes next. If the routine work is gone, where does the next generation of reviewers come from? Paul Saunders, chief strategy and innovation officer and partner at Stewart McKelvey in Halifax, calls it the “AI training conundrum,” and he is blunt about the stakes: “If you’re not doing that lower-level work, how do you then graduate to the higher-level skills that you will need to be a partner and a senior lawyer?” he asks.
Saunders learned how contracts work by grinding through leases line by line on due diligence files – an apprenticeship that vanishes the moment a junior uploads hundreds of leases and gets an automatic summary. He is now pressing for a training overhaul to protect junior lawyers precisely because that path is closing.
How firms close the gap
His answer is not to slow the technology down but to rebuild the teaching around it. Firms, he argues, need to “double down on traditional mentorship” – bringing juniors into client meetings and boardrooms so judgment transfers in real time, not only through redlined documents by email – and to reward that coaching through compensation rather than treating it as invisible labour. He wants law schools pulled into the redesign too, so graduates “hit the ground running when you get into that environment, not start from scratch,” he says. His recent warning to a Dalhousie University law class captures the urgency: “AI will not replace lawyers, but lawyers that use AI will replace those that don’t,” he told them.
The commercial pressure leaves little room to wait: clients, Cowling notes, will not “pay for hours and hours and hours for something that AI could do in two minutes.” That pressure is only accelerating, and Peters is blunt about the timeline. Within three years, he predicts, the gap between firms that have integrated this well and those that have not will be visible to clients and recruits alike.
Saunders, Cowling and Speigel are panelists at this year’s Canadian Legal Summit, which will examine these issues and many more in Toronto this October.
