The Da Vinci dilemma: where do elite lawyers add value in an AI world?
- 7 may
- 5 min de lectura
Actualizado: hace 2 días
AI is only one of the areas driving change in legal services, but it is forcing elite lawyers and their firms to answer some difficult questions. In this article, Professor Moray McLaren looks at how AI will be reshaping law firm economics and the delivery model in the years ahead
From commoditisation to disaggregation
During a strategy discussion with partners of an elite law firm, one asked how many assistants Leonardo da Vinci had. I didn’t know.
He explained that da Vinci worked with a team of around 20, focusing himself only on what mattered most: painting the face and the hands. At the time, we were discussing the increasing commoditisation of legal work and the growing pressure on the traditional law firm model. Even then, it was clear that legal work was no longer simply becoming more standardised - it was increasingly being broken into component parts, distributed across a wider ecosystem of providers and delivered through technology-enabled systems.
Elite firms were beginning to confront an uncomfortable reality. Some of their “bet the company” work was gradually sliding down the value curve towards process-driven and
increasingly price-sensitive work.
I wrote about this in the article “Finding an answer to the da Vinci question” (Modern Legal Practice, October 2017). Almost ten years on, the context has changed quite radically, although
the question is more relevant than ever.
In our new world of AI, whether legal work will change is no longer the issue. It already has.
What has shifted, and what I want to revisit here, is how “value” itself is being viewed and
delivered.
Redefining the “da Vinci” role
In 2017, what the “da Vinci” lawyer did was obvious - they painted the face and the hands.
My original framework for thinking about this was relatively simple: the legal value curve (set out in Insert A below). The model distinguishes between different forms of legal work according to both strategic importance and legal complexity, and how work gradually migrates from high-value bespoke advice towards more standardised delivery over time. At its heart was the idea that different forms of legal work create value in different ways. Some matters are strategically critical, legally complex and highly reputational. Others are important but more standardised. Others still are process-heavy, repeatable and increasingly price sensitive.
Over time, highly specialised work often becomes more familiar, more systematised and more standardised. What begins as “rocket science” gradually migrates towards relationship work and, in many cases, towards process work.
Even in 2017, change was already accelerating. Clients were demanding fixed fees, capped pricing and greater efficiencies. Work that had once justified premium hourly rates increasingly looked like a production line.
But commoditisation, it turns out, was only part of the story. The deeper shift is that legal work is no longer merely moving down the value curve; it is being disaggregated into separate elements across that axis.
At the same time, the economic foundations supporting the traditional law firm model were also beginning to weaken. For decades, value rested on an implicit assumption that it could be approximated - however imperfectly - through a combination of expertise, time and leverage: partners directing, juniors executing and profitability anchored in hourly billing.
The limits on this approach were clear. Significant amounts of time can be consumed on routine matters with limited incremental value, while a single moment of senior judgement can determine a client’s outcome. Clients have recognised this and are increasingly focused on outcomes, risk and speed rather than inputs. At the same time, work that once absorbed substantial amounts of lawyer time was increasingly being completed faster, more consistently and, crucially, through systems rather than individual effort.
All of which helps us frame the Da Vinci challenge in the future rather than answer it. If commoditisation, disaggregation, between them, reshape the work itself, what will be left that the elite lawyer does that nothing and nobody else can, particularly when clients have access to the same sophisticated AI tools? What, then, will they still turn to elite lawyers for?
The intermediary question
In a forthcoming paper, my colleague Paul Browne and I look specifically at the way AI may trigger a form of disintermediation - financial services, travel, media, recruitment and insurance, amongst others, all went through periods in which technology reduced the “information advantage” that had historically justified the intermediary’s position. In each case, part of the value previously captured by the intermediary moved elsewhere.
Law firms are clearly not immune. Historically, they gained their position for three reasons: knowing the law better than their clients, carry a regulated professional responsibility for the advice, and also providing judgement that was difficult to standardise. AI now mounts a credible challenge to the first of these foundations and, over time, may partially challenge the second. Work that historically consumed enormous amounts of associate time - can increasingly be completed faster and more cheaply through AI. The risk of disintermediation is therefore likely to appear first at the more standardised end of the market.
But the lessons from other sectors are clear.
Firstly, the intermediaries that survived were usually those that moved furthest towards the areas hardest to replace: judgement, trust, relationships, reputation and strategic business advice. In many ways, this is exactly where the “face and hands” of legal work now sit.
Secondly, what clients are buying is shifting from expertise towards accountability - towards the weight of the name and the reputation behind the advice. I recently saw this reflected in an engagement letter: sophisticated general counsel are now requiring named-partner sign- off on the AI-assisted elements of the work, and outside counsel guidelines are being rewritten to specify it.
The third is the new shape of the senior legal work. AI is most powerful in the middle of a process, where the question has been defined and the parameters are known. The elite lawyer’s value sits at the two ends: before the AI is used, in deciding what question is actually worth asking; and after the AI has produced its output, in deciding which parts to trust, which to discard, and what to recommend the client actually does. Both ends are critical and becoming more demanding, not less.
Taken together, these developments point to something larger, which I have come to think is perhaps the most important shift of all. The early framing was that AI would do the routine work while lawyers focused on the high-value work.
What I am actually seeing is something more nuanced. AI is raising the floor on technical legal work - everyone will inevitably become better at the basics, including in-house teams and the “chasing pack” law firms.
At the same time, the ceiling on human work is also rising, as judgement, accountability and problem-framing become more valuable, not less. The elite lawyer’s role increasingly sits in the higher value creation that AI struggles to replicate. The floor is rising as more firms become competent at the basics and the ceiling, or quality requirement, is rising too - it is the middle of the profession that looks the most exposed. In terms of the value-curve, the pressure is likely to fall most heavily on the large body of less-strategic work sitting between elite “rocket science” advice and commoditised delivery.
Moray McLaren, is Partner at Lexington Consultants, Professor at the LawAhead Centre on the Legal Profession at IE Law School in Madrid and a member of the Möller Institute at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Harvard´s Institute of Coaching.
