I remember the days well. A large case would come in. We would all be summoned to the senior partner’s corner conference room. Associates, junior partners, and paralegals would all huddle around a table with the senior partner at the head. The senior partner would explain the case, let us ask questions, and then divvy up what needed to be done based on the skill and experience of those around the table. Then we all would go our separate ways and go to work.
But what happens when the senior partner doesn’t need those people. Doesn’t need to have those meetings. Doesn’t need the conference room table or even an office. When all is replaced by agentic AI. Is this where we are headed and what are the consequences?
The LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters Announcements
[
From ‘Vendor’ To ‘Partner’: How LexisNexis Is Deepening Law Firm Relationships ](https://abovethelaw.com/2026/08/white-glove-service-in-ai-era/)
The company is emphasizing ‘white glove service’ in the AI era. Here’s what the initiative is delivering for clients.
I thought about these questions while at ILTACON this week. Two of the behemoth legal research and AI providers, LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, both announced significant advances in their platforms and products. These platforms use enhanced agentic AI to do much more of the work that the senior lawyer would assign in that conference room. Both platforms are designed to use agentic AI to perform multistep workflows.
LexisNexis announced the new capabilities in its Lexis+ with Protégé that will enable “legal professionals to move from first idea to review-ready work product in one intuitive AI experience.”
It also says: “For example, a lawyer can spot an issue earlier because the system surfaced it, a firm can apply its best thinking consistently instead of depending on who happens to be staffed on a matter…”
Goodbye conference room assignments. Goodbye conference rooms.
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Thomson Reuters goes even further in announcing the next generation of CoCounsel Legal and the launch of what it calls Thomson. TR bluntly proclaims, “CoCounsel Legal is engineered to work at the level of a senior associate…”
Senior associate? Really? Goodbye associates.
And both Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis promise that their models will only get better and do more.
Lots of Gains
Now I’m certainly not a curmudgeon when it comes to legal technology. For years, I had a national practice that required me to make use of technology. I was an early adopter. And I turned that passion into a second career writing about legal technology.
And I have to say there are lots of advantages to the sophisticated tools like those being offered by LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters. They sound great and promise to make the lives of lawyers and legal professionals so much easier. Just push a button and voila, all your questions are answered by a platform that knows exactly what to do.
No more waiting days for a product that’s not what you wanted because the associate didn’t understand, or the senior partner didn’t adequately explain what they wanted.
And for those in that conference room, no more thinking through what the senior partner wanted by combining your understanding of the partner and the matter and trying to make sense of it all.
All so cool. Less time. Better quality. And for clients, lower legal bills. So why am I uneasy?
**What Could Be Lost? **
In the short term, probably not much. In the long term, a lot. And therein lies the problem.
There is the long-term training issue. Most experienced lawyers now look back on how those conference room assignments we were given really trained us to be the lawyers we finally became. Yes, some of those assignments seemed pure drudgery. Some we hated. Sometimes we wondered why we went to law school to review document after document.
But that’s how we learned to think through problems. When we walked out of the partner’s office wondering what he or she really wanted, we had to think about the case holistically to try to figure what was needed. We had to figure out how to solve the problem at issue and why the research needed doing.
And on the senior level, those interactive discussions with young lawyers forced us to articulate problems and needs. We too had to think through the case. We had to figure out how to thoroughly explain problems and issues. Which is in fact what we had to do with clients, and to persuade judges and juries.
But when the bot can do most of this work we used to all do in those conference rooms and thereafter, something is lost. Skills are eroded.
We’ve seen what happens when skills erode before.
Whither Litigation
When I was a younger lawyer, lots of cases went to trial. Trial lawyers learned how to try cases actually trying cases. When a case started, an experienced lawyer could visualize how the case would play out in front of a jury or judge.
But gradually, for a whole lot of reasons, fewer and fewer cases actually went to trial. What was lost was the mindset of the litigator about how a case would be tried. Rather than approaching a case with trial as the end point, litigators began to see mediation and discovery as ends in and of themselves.
But when they aren’t and a case does go to trial, you have a lot of fish out of the water. Not to mention that the best way to get a good settlement is to be prepared and willing to go to trial.
But those experienced trial lawyers are getting fewer and far between. And, as a result, we have fewer trials.
But There Is More, Much More
And even more long term, when bots can do the work of the younger people in the conference room, there will be at least two significant impacts on the law firms and the profession, one financial and one qualitative.
The former fundamentally threatens the law firm model. Because one person can only bill so many hours per day/month, there is a ceiling on how much revenue one person can generate.
The solution was to leverage the work. One lawyer could generate a lot more money when they had a team of people working on a matter, maximizing the revenue generation beyond the billable hour ceiling. Leverage made us all a lot of money.
It’s in part why law firms got so big, so fast. And if it’s gone, what will replace it? For that matter, what happens to the whole concept of the law firm built on that model? Alexandra Smyth, the General Counsel of LexisNexis, believes that the in the future we could potentially end up with firms made up of a lot more senior people. That means less leverage.
Yes, but that’s okay, you say, since the senior partner is now much more valuable and can spend much more time contemplating their navel. (Oops, I mean strategic thinking.)
Which brings us to the second long-term impact on the training of young lawyers. A senior partner now doesn’t need the big support staff and can do more without it. They don’t need cadres of associates.
So why go through the expense of having associates and a massive support staff? Or as Joe Patrice, Senior Editor for Above the Law, asked recently: why even invest the time and expense to train young lawyers at all?
What about 10 years from now? Twenty years from now? When all those senior lawyers age out there are no experienced lawyers who learned by doing all those tasks we muddled through as associates. At some point, will the bot become the experienced senior lawyer and what would that mean for the profession?
Is There a Solution?
In a word, yes. But it requires long-range thinking and investment that law firms and lawyers are not known for being fond of. It will require the use of things like simulations and alternative training methods that will take the place of experience through actual situations. It will require a commitment to younger associates knowing that it will be a cost that’s tempting to avoid.
It will require a partnership between vendors, clients, and law firms to invest in and be willing to pay for training to ensure there will be good competent representation in the future. Less focus on dividing up profits at the end of the year. Less focus on today’s legal costs. More focus on where those costs and quality of representation may go in the future.
What better place than at ILTA to address these very issues. But I don’t see a lot of long-term thinking about this here or anywhere else. And I’ll be honest. I’m not sure any of the players are willing to make that commitment.
To that point, I attended a press briefing hosted by Thomson Reuters. The seven-person panel included representatives of TR and several AI vendors they are partnering with. I asked if, as vendors, they believed they had any responsibility to play a role in the training of young lawyers in light of the development of all the AI tools that replace much of the work young lawyers used to do. And, if so, what they were doing about it.
Blank looks. One panelist said yes and then talked about learning by doing. Another talked about how using the tools saved time. That’s like telling your dog not to pee on the floor and hoping he gets it.
Ignoring the issues is not only sad. It’s short-sighted. So what else is new?
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.