"Clients do not come to lawyers for advice any more. They come for confirmation."

This is a compelling and eye-catching (paraphrased) statement from Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, delivered in a speech to Exeter University last week.

Vos offered his thoughts on where AI is taking the legal profession, stating in full:

"The first thing that I am going to mention is already widely observed in law firms. The clients still come to lawyers. But instead of coming to seek legal advice, they come to seek a lawyer’s confirmation of the correctness of what AI has told them is the legal position. And, of course, they do not want to pay their lawyer the same fee as they would have paid before they had access to AI-driven legal advice."

This is a bold prediction from the second most senior judge in England and Wales and, in this writer's opinion, Vos is clearly right.

Lawyers will survive the machine age. However, survival is not the same as continuity and the profession must change and adapt accordingly.

Vos's speech can be found here and is worth reading in full. It is very digestible. Joshua Rozenberg has covered the speech briefly here; my aim in this piece is to extend Vos's argument rather than summarise it.

Briefly, Vos makes several key observations in his statement.

He argues that lawyers are not being replaced but are being repositioned as clients come to them to have AI output confirmed.

He argues that economics will drive the shift, whether in relation to machines in judiciary, or in client expectations.

He argues that routine judicial decisions will be, at least, machine informed within 20 years.

Vos argues, from these observations, that lawyers remain critical to the legal system. The role may change but, fundamentally, the work of a human lawyer will be needed and, indeed, still valued.

The hardest version of the opposing view, put at Legalweek in March, is that "AI will replace lawyers who use AI as well as lawyers who don't" (Legal IT Insider). I don't accept that view. Roberts assumes that the technology will entirely replace lawyers, but Vos argues that the substitution is only in part of the work of a lawyer.

Vos's observation that routine judicial decisions will, in time, be machine-informed is of interest: the same economics that streamline the courts will also reshape what clients expect to pay for. That is a separate piece that I plan to return to shortly.

Before we consider the role of lawyers in this new, machine judicial landscape, let us first consider how clients are utilising AI.

It is now simply a reality for lawyers that clients will have asked an AI tool their questions before they come and ask you. I challenge any reader to deny that this is a clear and prevalent trend in the industry now. I sympathise with doctors who, for many years now, have had to tolerate patients who have googled their symptoms and come to the worst possible conclusion. However, in the civil litigation world, it seems to have become the inverse; clients have asked AI and been reassured that they are in the right. It is rarely so simple.

However, AI is very good at parsing huge amounts of data and delivering it in a sensible format. This means that clients now often present me with organised information in a way I could only have dreamed of when I was a trainee solicitor.

AI is also very good at spreadsheets and number-related tasks. It is now relatively easy for AI to take a disorganised bundle of financial information in a divorce, and prepare a schedule of matrimonial assets.

It is very interesting to this writer that County Courts are reporting to Vos that pleadings are better, not worse, than before AI. It is only an advantage to the justice system that cases are presented properly and this is particularly important in those areas with large numbers of litigants in person such as family law, employment, and small claims disputes.

This writer has noticed the trend that Vos refers to, quoted at the start of this editorial; that clients are no longer clueless but looking for confirmation and verification of advice they have already received.

This, inevitably, will change a client's perception of cost. As the type of lawyer that charges an hourly rate, the streamlining of this advice will invite the client to consider why they are paying for several hours of work for a "simple" answer. This is especially true in the era of TikTok and short attention spans.

It should be noted that the notorious issue of short attention spans should not be viewed as disrespect. As Vos notes, social media has shaped many lives and led to an incorrect assumption that all answers and solutions are available a simple tap away.

Law rarely works like that. It is not clean and simple, despite the work of innumerable great minds.

However, in my experience, this resistance to expensive and complete legal advice is not hypothetical but something I am already seeing. Clients that would previously pay for several hours work and a deep dive opinion, instead want a (low) fixed fee to review what they already believe is the case.

It follows, Vos argues (and I concur), that lawyers will need to be more tech savvy and able to use the tools available to more effectively and efficiently represent our clients' interests.

Lawyers offer confidence in a system in a way that machines, at least for now, do not. The administration of justice is, as Vos notes, about confidence and trust in a system. Lawyers will facilitate that trust.

Something that is often lost in these discussions is the value of the human element in many areas of law. As a civil litigation solicitor, I consider a significant part of my job is to take on the stress and worry of a case for a client, and support them through it. I have yet to be convinced that a machine can offer that same service.

How we adapt to this as a profession is an interesting challenge (more on that below).

Vos has an incentive to reassure, and although I do not disagree with his comments, I see some logical extensions of them.

However, he does pass over the "reduce recruitment" issue. Fewer training contracts now means a succession gap in 10-15 years. The LexisNexis 2026 finding (72% flag deep legal reasoning as the biggest junior skills gap) is the early symptom of this change. If juniors learn judgement by grinding research and bundles, and AI now does all those steps, then the next generation's judgement is being formed by osmosis, at best.

Coming back to the resistance on charging, it also seems clear that work will be of a lower margin. Vos acknowledges that fees drop but he does not say what that means for firms built on previous ratios.

There is an uncomfortable implication underlying Vos's very sensible conclusions. Not every firm currently in business will survive this, even if every lawyer who wants to stay a lawyer can.

I suspect that Vos knows this and was politely avoiding the topic given the context of the speech.

Vos is right that lawyers will survive, and I share his view. But survival is not the same as continuity. The industry will change. The question Vos politely steps around is the one firms will need to sit with; if the work shifts from advice to confirmation, if fees compress, and if juniors no longer form judgement by grinding the work AI now does for them, can a firm be built on the old ratios and expect to survive the transition?

The profession will endure. But it does not follow that every firm currently in it will. That is not a reason for alarm, but it is a reason to stop treating AI as a mere productivity story and start treating it as a business-model one. The lawyers who will do best are the ones who read Vos's speech as a quiet warning to their partnership, not a reassurance to the profession.

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Serhan

UK Legal AI Brief

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