TL;DR
Lord Neuberger, former president of the UK Supreme Court, has warned that AI could cause “a real fall-off in recruitment of young lawyers” in the medium term. Giving the keynote at this year’s International Malaysia Law Conference in Kuala Lumpur, reported by the New Straits Times on 28 October, he said accounts circulating in London suggest the shift has begun.
The argument
Neuberger’s case rests on the work trainees and newly qualified lawyers do. Pleadings, advice letters and research notes drafted by AI, he said, are often as good as what a lawyer starting out would write, and come “more quickly and cheaply”. He singled out drafting and research as the work most exposed.
The longer-term worry is succession. If firms hire fewer juniors, he asked, “how do we get the next generation of experienced senior lawyers”?
He did not predict this with certainty. Cheaper advice and representation could raise demand for legal services overall, he noted, and he sees “nothing wrong in principle” with lawyers or judges using AI, provided its output is checked rigorously. He pointed to an English case where the Court of Appeal publicly rebuked an advocate whose AI-generated submissions included invented court decisions.
Two senior judges, one week
The speech lands in the same week that Geoffrey Vos, retiring Master of the Rolls, told WIRED that chatbots are already pushing up county court claims, as we report separately. Neuberger looked further ahead too, saying AI might one day decide complex disputes on both fact and law. Unlike Vos, he stressed the obstacle: litigants have a basic right to understand why a decision went against them, especially when liberty, homes or children are at stake, and even developers may not know how a model reached its answer.
The concern about entry-level roles is not confined to law. Adzuna’s September figures put graduate vacancies at their lowest since 2016, which we cover here.
Looking Forward
Neuberger offered no figures, and his London evidence is anecdotal. In our view, the question for UK firms is less whether AI can draft than how they will train people once drafting is no longer the training ground. Firms that keep hiring juniors will need to redesign what those first years involve, with checking and judgement replacing first drafts as the core of the job.