At ClioCon 2025 in Boston, author Richard Susskind delivered a standing-room-only closing keynote titled How to Think About AI – A Guide for the Legal Profession.
Susskind is the world’s most cited author on the future of legal services and a leading expert on the impact of AI on society. The longtime futurist’s message was part history lesson, part strategic roadmap, and part warning. His core argument: stop focusing on the tools and start focusing on the outcomes.
He opened with a story about Black & Decker executives who are reminded that customers don’t buy drills—they buy holes. For lawyers, the analogy is clear. Most of the profession still clings to the “power drill” mindset, imagining a future where current methods are simply faster or more efficient. But clients care less about process and more about results: solving problems quickly, reliably, and at a predictable cost.
Beyond Faster Old Workflows
Susskind distinguished between automation and innovation. The first sixty-five years of legal technology, he said, were almost entirely about automation—taking existing processes and digitizing them. True innovation, by contrast, allows professionals to do things never before possible. In practice, that means using AI to prevent disputes rather than merely manage them, or to build compliance into business processes instead of fixing violations after the fact.
“The story of AI is not just automation or innovation,” he said. “It’s also elimination.”
That line drew murmurs across the room. The suggestion that AI could eliminate the need for certain legal tasks—and even entire categories of work—was less a provocation than a prediction. Yet Susskind cautioned that elimination should not be viewed as a loss, but as an opportunity to redirect human expertise toward higher-value work: strategy, judgment, empathy, and ethics. He pointed to healthcare as a parallel: the future is not just robotic surgery, but preventative medicine. Law, he argued, will follow a similar path toward “preventative lawyering,” using technology to reduce disputes and expand access to justice.
Planning for the Inevitable
Tracing the arc of AI’s development, Susskind reminded the audience that today’s generative models are simply the latest chapter in a story that began with Alan Turing in 1950. The real inflection point, however, came with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022. What surprised him most wasn’t the technology itself, but how suddenly lawyers realized their work could be replicated—at least in part—by machines.
He outlined six possible futures for AI, ranging from “the hype hypothesis,” where limitations cap its impact, to the far more radical visions of superintelligence and human–AI integration. For lawyers, he said, the first three matter most: hype, Gen-AI+, and artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Susskind believes Gen-AI+ systems—those that are mostly reliable and deeply integrated into daily work—will arrive by 2030. He also urged the profession to plan for AGI between 2030 and 2035. That doesn’t mean predicting it will happen, but recognizing that the consequences would be profound if it did. He framed those years as plausible planning horizons, not forecasts, warning that failing to prepare for such possibilities would be “a grave dereliction of duty.”
Adoption Lags Advance
Even as technology accelerates, legal adoption will remain “jagged” due to regulatory, cultural, and economic friction. Some partners will take comfort in that lag. Others will see opportunity. “First-mover advantage will be real,” he cautioned.
He identified three persistent biases that block progress. Technological myopia keeps lawyers focused on current limitations rather than the direction of travel. “Not-us” thinking convinces each practice group that others are more exposed to automation. And human-service nostalgia leads lawyers to confuse the process of lawyering with the outcomes clients actually want. Overcoming these biases, he said, is essential if the profession hopes to serve society more broadly and close widening access-to-justice gaps.
From Competing With Machines to Building Them
Susskind’s bluntest advice came near the end: stop trying to do the work machines can, and start building the systems that will replace the old ways of working. The lawyers of the future, he suggested, will be content providers whose expertise is encoded into products, platforms, and intelligent workflows. New hybrid roles—legal data scientists, knowledge engineers, and low-code builders—will be central to this transformation.
The market, he said, “will show no loyalty to traditional ways of lawyering” if AI delivers the same outcomes faster, cheaper, and better. He also reminded the audience that the most enduring value lawyers bring—empathy, ethical reasoning, and human judgment—will remain vital complements to AI-driven systems.
What Comes Next
For legal professionals, Susskind’s guidance forms a practical roadmap. The first step is to reframe matters around outcomes—focusing on risk avoided, time saved, and client success rather than traditional deliverables. Firms should also develop a two-track strategy: one that automates high-volume, low-risk work with proper oversight, and another that experiments with innovative tools such as AI-driven compliance and self-service dispute resolution. Reliability must become an operational goal, with firms setting clear standards for acceptable error rates and logging AI decisions for review.
Just as important is preparing for the next wave of change. Anticipating advanced AI—even AGI—means running scenarios now to identify ethical and regulatory gaps. Finally, Susskind’s message about talent is clear: firms will need to pair legal expertise with data, design, and product skills, creating teams capable of building systems that redefine how legal problems are prevented or solved.
Reflection
What stands out about Susskind’s framework is its clarity and practicality. Rather than speculating about disruption, he offers a structured way to think about progress and prepare for it. For those of us covering the evolution of legal technology, his message is both sobering and motivating.
The real challenge for firms and legal innovators is not to predict when AI will transform the profession, but to start designing for that transformation now. As Susskind reminded the audience, the future will belong to those who stop perfecting the drill and focus instead on delivering the hole their clients actually need.