Alberto Barragán ⚫⚫⚫

This Spectator piece reads like gossip until you realize it’s actually a warning. A senior English barrister takes a real appeal he spent a day and a half writing, feeds it to an AI model, and gets back something better in 30 seconds. It matched the standard of the very best barristers, and it did it instantly, for pennies. That’s the moment the illusion breaks. Law has always sold itself as irreplaceable because it’s complex, nuanced, and human. But most of the value in modern legal work isn’t wisdom. It’s pattern recognition, structure, precedent matching, argument assembly, and risk framing. That’s exactly the territory AI eats first. The scary part isn’t that AI can draft contracts or scan case law. That’s already obvious. The scary part is that once the output quality crosses a threshold, the pricing logic collapses. Clients don’t care how many years it took you to become a barrister if the document they receive is objectively worse than something generated in seconds. So the profession reaches for comfort stories. “AI is just a tool.” “There will always be a human in the loop.” “Judges and clients want a human face.” Those are emotional arguments, not economic ones. And economics always wins. The barrister in the piece understands something most of his peers don’t want to admit. Law isn’t protected by status or tradition. It’s protected by cost and friction. Once those disappear, so does the moat. The first to go are process lawyers. Then drafting specialists. Then advisory roles with no client relationship. Eventually people start asking why they’re paying six figures for a human to read out arguments an AI already wrote better. What makes this explosive isn’t just unemployment. It’s who lawyers are in society. They sit at the top of institutions. They write rules. They shape policy. They’re used to being indispensable. Replacing them doesn’t just disrupt jobs. It destabilizes power. That’s why the resistance will be fierce. There will be calls to ban AI. To regulate it out of courtrooms. To slow it down. But you can’t regulate away a cost advantage that large. The most honest line in the whole piece is the advice to his niece. Don’t take on decades of debt for a career whose core value has already been automated. Not in twenty years. Now. This isn’t anti law. It’s anti denial. AI isn’t coming for lawyers because it hates them. It’s coming because much of what they do turned out to be legible, compressible, and cheap. And once that happens, respect doesn’t save you. Only reality does.