We will likely have more lawyers in the future than today, because: 1) AI will cause so many more people to ask legal questions which will encourage them to need to verify or execute through an actual lawyer. 2) AI will cause an explosion of more and more exotic legal terms that lawyers will be spending even more time reviewing redlines or new cases around. 3) All the new areas of law that now are emerging around the use of AI itself in every single industry. AI introduces an explosion of IP, privacy, and regulatory compliance challenges across all verticals. This has historical precedent as well. Between the creation of the PC and the internet (both technologies that made the legal profession far more efficient), the ABA pegs active attorneys having gone from roughly 400,000 in 1975 to roughly 1,375,000 in 2025. When we make professions more efficient and automated, often demand for them goes up not down.
