Craig Ball never needs help making his own points about any legal tech topic, but this time Craig passes the Ball* on the disruptive power of AI!
In Craig’s post titled The Most Important Thing I’ve Read This Year (available here), Craig notes: “Hallucinations are no more a reliable measure of AI’s future in law than the Wright brothers’ first flight was a measure of modern aviation, or Edison’s scratchy recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb foretold the limits of recorded music. Early imperfections in transformative technologies are poor predictors of their ultimate impact.”
Then, Craig does something he has never done before on his blog: Craig passes the ball to another author and publishes his essay. The essay is by Matt Shumer. Craig notes: “Yes, he’s an ‘AI guy,’ deeply invested in the technology. But dismissing what he says on that basis would be a mistake. Even if AI helped draft it, the insight behind it is unmistakably human, wise and worth your attention.
Shumer’s essay draws a parallel to the last time we all faced something truly disruptive. Can you guess what that is? The Covid pandemic. As Shumer notes: “over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn’t have believed if you’d described it to yourself a month earlier.”
While Shumer notes that “AI had been improving steadily” for years, he points to February 5th, when two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic. As he notes: “something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.”
Continuing, he says: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.”
Wow.
For those who use the argument that the tools still aren’t that good and they hallucinate frequently, Shumer says: “The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is ‘really getting better’ or ‘hitting a wall’ — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant.”
Strong words.
Why does this matter to you?
AI isn’t just replacing specific skills but serves as a general substitute for cognitive labor. Any role involving reading, writing, analyzing, and communicating via a digital interface is subject to disruption.
Impacted professional fields include:
- Legal work: AI can now summarize case law, draft complex briefs, and conduct research at levels exceeding junior associates. Managing partners at major firms report using AI as a “team of instant associates.”
- Software engineering: The field has moved from AI-assisted coding to AI-driven development. Significant portions of the engineering workforce may become redundant as AI handles multi-day, tens-of-thousands-of-lines-of-code projects autonomously.
- Financial analysis: AI handles complex financial modeling, investment memo generation, and tax return audits with increasing precision.
- Medical analysis: AI is approaching or exceeding human performance in reading medical scans, suggesting diagnoses, and reviewing vast quantities of medical literature.
- Writing and content: As Shumer says: “The quality has reached a point where many professionals can’t distinguish AI output from human work.”
Does this mean we’re doomed? Shumer provides several suggestions as to what you should do to address the AI boom, including:
- Use Tiered Tools: Avoid free-tier versions of AI, which are often over a year behind current capabilities. Utilize the most capable models (e.g., GPT-5.2 or Claude Opus 4.6) for actual work.
- Push the Limits: Do not treat AI as a search engine. Use it for complex tasks: drafting counterproposals for contracts, building financial models from messy data, or identifying narrative trends in quarterly reports.
- The “One Hour” Rule: Commit one hour daily to experimenting with new AI tools. The “bar is on the floor” regarding public proficiency; consistent daily use places a professional in the top 1% of the workforce.
- Adopt Adaptability: The specific tools will become obsolete quickly. The goal is to develop the “muscle” of learning new workflows repeatedly.
- Lean into Licensed Accountability: Focus on roles that require legal responsibility, physical presence, or high-stakes trust and relationships, as these have longer (though not permanent) lead times before total automation.
- Financial Hedging: Build savings and avoid new, long-term debt that assumes current income levels are guaranteed. The “capability” for massive disruption is already present; economic realization will follow.
Oh, and he also advises us to “Rethink what you’re telling your kids”, as the traditional path of getting good grades, going to a good college, landing a stable professional job may not be the path to success going forward. “[T]he people most likely to thrive are the ones who are deeply curious, adaptable, and effective at using AI to do things they actually care about.”
Of course, in a blog post about AI disruption, I couldn’t help but use AI to cover it. In addition to the two bullet point lists above, here is an infographic from Craig’s post discussing Shumer’s essay:
Whether you totally buy into what he’s saying or not, you can’t stop the freight train that is AI. Unless you live under a rock, you can see that it’s advancing rapidly in terms of its capabilities – which is both exciting and scary (as Shumer points out the “people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet”. Staying on top of it – by not only learning the tools now but continuing to do so as they rapidly change – isn’t something to aspire to anymore. It’s table stakes.
So, what do you think? Are you concerned about the disruptive power of AI? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Image created using Microsoft Designer, using the term “robot basketball player passing the basketball to another robot basketball player”.
*See what I did there? 😉
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.