Most junior lawyers add very little value. In the past, trainees carried documents to court, acting as highly overpaid couriers. Today, the tasks look different but the commercial impact is the same.
And that's okay.
Those trainees of yesteryear, even though their workload was cannibalised by innovation, still blossomed into highly competent partners. The cultural and technological disruption of the 1980s, the incipient internet era and one phone per village, was arguably greater and more terrifying than modern times.
Yet they survived.
Junior level grunt work isn't disappearing. It's evolving and getting more complex. Partners like Mark now have to figure out how to pass on their judgement to humans, while giving work to AI.
The profession has always relied on inefficient work to train efficient lawyers.
The comfort of chaos
Mark’s world is built on things going wrong. Not wishing for it, one hopes, but dependent on it all the same. Bribery, sanctions, regulatory headaches - the sort of problems that arrive suddenly and take up stubborn residence.
What’s changed isn’t the existence of these problems. It’s their texture.
Sanctions, once a niche, have metastasised into something approaching a full-time occupation. Not because lawyers suddenly developed a taste for them, but because the world insists on creating them at pace. Entire practices could now be sustained on sanctions work alone - a prospect that would have seemed incredulous a decade ago.
The real difficulty isn’t just the volume. It’s contradiction. One jurisdiction demands compliance. Another forbids it. The client sits in the middle, blinking.
Mark, naturally, is expected to make it make sense.
Cracks in the global order
For years, the merits of globalisation were gospel. Frictionless trade, expanding markets, seamless supply chains. It all sounded terribly clever.
And it was. Right up until it wasn't.
Now, clients aren’t just asking whether they can do business. They’re asking whether they can do business without accidentally upsetting three governments or triggering an international incident.
Counterparty due diligence has become hazardous.
How far down the chain do you go? How confident do you need to be? What if your counterparty’s counterparty’s counterparty is doing something disagreeable in a jurisdiction you’ve never heard of?
There’s no quick and easy answer, much to the chagrin of clients.
The renewables gold rush
Renewables have upset the status quo.
The barriers to entry have collapsed. You no longer need billions and an offshore rig to participate. Some pocket money and a willingness to assemble metal frames in a field will suffice.
That’s excellent for the energy transition. Less so for compliance.
Where entry is easy, actors become less sophisticated. And when that happens, adherence to the rules wanes. Carbon credits, in particular, have developed a reputation for creative accounting. Forests about as real as Lothlórien. Forests that exist several times over. Sustainability claims that are, at best, aspirational.
None of this is especially surprising. Every new market has its “painted nickel” phase. Regulation eventually catches up.
In the meantime, lawyers earn their keep.
AI: the overworked intern
Then there’s AI.
Mark’s view is that AI is useful - just not in the way people seem to want it to be. It excels at the things lawyers quietly resent: sorting data, organising documents, surfacing patterns. It can turn 15,000 lines of expenses into something intelligible in minutes.
That’s transformative.
What it doesn’t do, at least not reliably, is think. Or structure an argument with the kind of disciplined clarity that good advocacy demands. It can produce something that looks plausible. But if the foundational input is wrong, the entire edifice collapses.
Which creates an awkward tension.
If AI can get you 70% of the way there, and a junior lawyer can do roughly the same, who gets the work? More importantly, how does the junior lawyer surpass the machine to become a senior lawyer? Who bears the cost of the training?
This isn’t a philosophical problem. It’s a commercial one. And it hasn’t been solved.
The only advice that matters
For all the noise, the fundamentals remain stubbornly intact.
Know the detail. Not vaguely, not conceptually, but completely. The facts of a case are still the one thing you can control, and they’re often the difference between competence and genuine value.
Do more. Not more hours, necessarily, but more variety. The marginal cost of learning early in your career is negligible. The long-term return is extraordinary.
Just as we reflect on bundling, light manual labour and the fax machine as primitive for a junior lawyer, so too will the tasks before you today resemble something as farcical in the future.
The times they are a-changing.