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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