Law, disrupted Mailbag: The Future of AI in Litigation, International Legal Practice, and Keys to a Successful Legal Career

John Quinn (0:03)

This is John Quinn, and this is Law Disrupted. And today we're going to continue what we did on the last episode, and that is to address some of the questions that listeners have sent in to us. And with me to help me do this is the producer Alexis Hyde. So Alexis, fire away.

Alexis Hyde (0:20)

All right, let's get going. Do you believe that there will be more or less lawyers than there are today in three years time?

John Quinn (0:30)

Three years time? Three years time.

Alexis Hyde (0:32)

2029

John Quinn (0:33)

Three years time, there will be more lawyers. I understand, by the way, that law school, you know these things, the popularity of law school versus business school versus whatever ebbs and flows. And I understand right now that law school applications are peaking.

So for whatever reason, we're at a point where there's greater interest in law school than there sometimes is. But three years from now, sure, I mean, there will be more lawyers. I assume the import in the question is really, what's going to be the impact of AI for demand for lawyers' legal services?

Alexis Hyde (1:11)

I think you're right.

John Quinn (1:12)

And lawyers as opposed to autonomous agents giving legal advice, which isn't possible yet. You still have to be a lawyer to give legal advice. An AI can't officially give legal advice, although obviously people consult AIs all the time.

There's a lot of talk about, will there be the same demand for junior and less experienced lawyers in the future in the AI world, where the AIs have become so capable and can generate pretty good drafts of documents and analyze documents, discovery materials and the like.

I can only say that at our firm, I think we've been very fast forward on adoption of AI and fully appreciate its benefits at our firm. But we haven't yet seen a decreased demand for younger and junior lawyers. Yes, we need lawyers who can optimize the AI and who are skilled at it. There's different skill sets required, but we haven't seen a falling off in the demand. Whether that will actually come about, I have to believe that in some types of law practice, some law firms, whether it's personal injury or firms that hire lower value and less complex cases than we do, I can really see a lot of the work being automated. But my hunch is at the very top of the profession, the firms handling the most challenging matters, there's always going to be a demand for really skilled human beings.

Alexis Hyde (2:52)

That brings us to our next question. If you were starting Quinn Emanuel today in this age of AI, what would you build differently or would you?

John Quinn (3:03)

Well, I mean, you really do need to have an AI platform and incorporate that into everything that you do as lawyers. And we've spent time at our firm investing in that. We've looked at all the legal tech offerings that come out. And yes, there are some that we subscribe to or take licenses to. But we haven't found any that really, they're on the marketplace that are really designed for litigators and for our work or at least in an optimal way. So, we have at our firm developed our own platform.

It's a platform designed by eight litigators, four litigators, which facilitate the types of work streams that we always have to do in just about every case. So, that's something that you'd want to build from the very beginning, I think, if we're starting a law firm today. And you'd want to make sure that all your lawyers were trained to be power users of AI and that would be integrated into how they practice law. So, that's one thing that I think would be a real focus.

Alexis Hyde (4:17)

Yeah.

Oh, this is a good one. You have offices in China, in Beijing, in Shanghai. How is that practice affected by the geopolitical tensions between the US and China?

John Quinn (4:30)

Well, that's interesting.

We did open our first office in China, in Shanghai, I want to say, 12, 13 years ago, I'm guessing.

And at the time, that was really, our work really consisted of advising Western companies that were doing inbound investment into China with respect to legal issues that we face. As an international law firm, even though our lawyers in China are Chinese nationals, Chinese qualified lawyers, international law firms are not permitted to give advice on Chinese law. But we could help Western investors in doing due diligence, helping them deal with compliance problems. When they had issues with the government, we could help them pick the right Chinese council to work with, and we could work with them and sit behind them and be intermediaries and participate in the background, although we couldn't appear in court, obviously. So when we first opened the office, it was very much focused on inbound investment and Western companies doing business in China. Now in recent years, that has pretty much disappeared. You don't have the private equity firms to the same degree, the venture capital firms and other investors making investments in China. Many of them, and many of the law firms for that matter, have closed their offices in China. So our practice really has pivoted to representing Chinese companies of all kinds in disputes that they have around the world, whether it's Africa, Europe, the US, or wherever. And, you know, you have these major Chinese companies, they're global companies and they're, you know, very ambitious, very forward thinking.