Will AI replace me?

When folks learn I am an attorney, they increasingly ask if I am concerned that AI agents — autonomous intelligent systems performing specific tasks without human intervention — will replace me. 

Usually, I detect shades of schadenfreude in their tone — although as a commercial attorney I would not have participated in any stressful divorces, personal injury settlements, or real estate closings that seem to color the public's perception of my profession. I represent businesses, usually in connection with technology contract negotiations and new ventures. 

Though there is increasing evidence AI agents will replace many of the functions performed by specialized attorneys, I still scoff at the idea that an AI agent will replace me.

An AI agent could never understand the nuance I have accrued over 30 years of practicing law. An AI agent could never intuitively "read a room" and let go of matters that seemed important before a meeting but have been supplanted by the blossoming of opportunities in an evolving conversation. And an AI agent certainly could not replace the trust I have earned among clients, especially after working long winter nights together through a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Perhaps this is a bit of whistling past the graveyard, however.

Although I may not want to admit it, an AI agent could replace me one day, particularly in connection with contract drafting and some degree of negotiation. Even the unique and personal qualities I described could one day be subsumed by an AI agent, without some of the "character" — as in "he's a character" — ascribed to me by my loved ones, usually while shaking their heads. If in 30 years I have learned to discern gradation and tone, a continuously-trained AI agent could achieve the same range. 

The increasing standardization of contracts is another reason an AI agent could replace me. Negotiations of even big dollar deals have changed from ritualized, yet sometimes intense, face-to-face interactions to tedious form-filling exercises designed by client advisors to maximize vendor commitments in the earlier stages of request for proposal processes. 

More recently, Big Tech and other large companies have deployed their standard master services agreements in a more disciplined manner, covering large swaths of their vendor ecosystems with a uniform carpet of terms and conditions. And the "platforming" of many business functions on customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and other systems has resulted in the consolidation of client agreements among a few dominant players. These changes will make it easier for AI agents to take over a wide band of the contract formation and management functions currently performed by attorneys and procurement professionals.

Also, as AI-to-AI interactions expand, I expect a new body of law will also develop — by AI for AI. We may not initially discern it as a new body of law, but then again, arguably many elements of contract law have started out as normative arrangements.

In other words, for the last 150 years, or so, the commercial bar — that is, commercial attorneys like me — have agreed that certain clauses are "reasonable" to reduce transaction costs for clients and grease the skids of commerce. I expect something similar will start to happen as AI-to-AI negotiations become commonplace, and what appear to be new technical "details" relating to, for example, interoperability, will become part of a novel canon of law that may only be fully valued by AI agents.

More importantly, my professional portfolio largely is the role of an agent. For example, when I negotiate contracts, I do so "on behalf of" my clients. That is, as an agent for my principals. By deploying an AI agent, my clients would be able to more easily internalize, at lower cost, legal functions that currently are shifted to outside counsel, like me, due to capacity constraints and limited subject matter expertise.

I do not believe the quality of the work performed by an AI agent will be better than the quality of work delivered by a good attorney. In most cases, I believe clients will forgo perceived quality because they would be willing to trade legal risks for commercial benefits, such as access to lower-cost technology services with fewer transition risks, which will allow them to mitigate business risks operationally rather than through contracts and other legal mechanisms. 

Of course, unique and particularly large transactions — like major merger and acquisition deals — will require a human touch, and, by law, an attorney will need to be the principal of any AI agents rendering functions that encroach on the practice of law. Realistically, though, I expect many clients will ultimately perceive legal risks as abstract compared to commercial benefits like immediate cost savings, and quickly enlist AI agents to facilitate many contractual relationships.

All that being said, the qualities that truly make me unique for clients, such as the hard-earned trust that enables me to manage their employees as I help them start new ventures, reflect less traditional legal services and are more principal-like. Also, as we become more experienced, we become better at discerning qualities that extend beyond professionalism that make individuals valuable to an organization. 

As part of what I consider strategic advice, I particularly enjoy not only working on new ventures with my clients' capable personnel, but also sharing my know-how with them. And that, I believe, will be the key to the successful deployment of AI — treating AI agents more like persons than things. 

As we prepare for the deployment of armies of AI agents, it is important to understand the legal and technical limitations of AI agents in the principal-agent relationships we are creating. However, it also is important to understand the expectations for the principals in those relationships, because their impact on organizations and society will be magnified. The importance of addressing this topic cannot be overstated, because the public is anxious about a future under AI.

These expectations will parallel some of the soul-searching currently taking place in the U.S. and other countries. We seem to yearn for a national purpose and moral backbone to unify us and drive us forward but are paralyzed by fear of the "other" that will usurp our livelihoods and diminish our perceived social status. 

AI, of course, is another "other."

Undoubtedly AI will be highly disruptive to workplaces and cultures, and yet it will be impossible to cajole it back into its bottle like an impudent genie. Our challenges and yearnings for AI, from mitigating the effects of climate change, to building space elevators, to developing new cancer-shrinking drugs, to minimizing biases and violence, will never advance until we learn to treat AI agents like persons. It will be the qualities of principals rather than the limitations of agents that will determine the success of AI. 

Personally, I believe the "Age of Enlightenment" provides the most helpful lens through which we may discern these qualities. I like to gift young college students a copy of Ron Chernow's "Washington: A Life," a biography of the eponymous Founding Father, in part because it illuminates that power is not something taken, but given away, judiciously. 

As principals increasingly give more power to their AI agents, they will need to treat them not as tools, but as extensions of themselves, and provide them the same training, education, management attention and career paths they would have offered to a younger version of themselves. This approach hopefully will reduce anxieties about AI by creating an expectation that it will live by our principles, and make its deployment more effective and fair. 

So, yes, perhaps in a decade or so AI will replace me, and possibly earlier in connection with certain routine areas such as the review of nondisclosure agreements. But I expect I will be spending more time providing my clients with strategic advice and particularly working with talented leaders earlier in the planning stages of new ventures — that is, areas in which I can make more of a contribution to the success of my clients' businesses. 

Alex Ferraté, CIPP/E, CIPM, FIP, is a commercial attorney in the Washington, D.C., area.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not contain legal advice.