Women working in legal profession vulnerable to AI automation

ABC NEWS (Australia)

As we keep hearing artificial intelligence is set to change the workforce. New research from the University of Sydney reveals graduates working in the legal profession are particularly vulnerable and the majority of them are women.

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00:00Women now make up a majority of new entrants to the legal profession and have done for about

00:08a decade. And in about the last three or four years, women have now surpassed men as a majority

00:16of practicing solicitors in most states and territories or all states and territories in

00:23Australia. But they are disproportionately located in the lower status, lower paid ranks of the

00:31profession. And these are the ones that are at greatest risk of being disrupted through

00:35automation and digitalization. We need to be wary about jumping too quickly to a job apocalypse

00:44scenario with this. And it's also important to put this in context that technology has been

00:50reshaping the legal profession for a long time now. Our study was actually conducted in the years

00:58immediately leading up to the release of ChatGPT. And lawyers were already telling us at that point

01:05that automation and digital platforms were disrupting things like basic contract work, due diligence work,

01:13discovery work, the types of kind of core legal tasks where entry-level lawyers cut their teeth.

01:20That is being accelerated by artificial intelligence and large language models. But it is more reshaping

01:30the way legal work gets done rather than at this point, replacing or displacing lawyers from those jobs.

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