It’s automating the document review part, to be sure. Basically massive parallel grep against gigabytes or terabytes of preserved electronic documents. Paper document sleuthing (“doc review”) used to be the most common (and most reviled) work of first year associates. The first pass is now automated and so they’re doing much more valuable second-pass work now.

Tech is automating away a lot of the work being done by people currently called lawyers. Whether you think that work is "secretarial" or "actual legal work" is a matter of opinion.

I thought that's what paralegals were for?

There are too many lawyers and a lot of lawyers end up doing things that a paralegal would do.

you forget that lawyers can create work for themselves, no matter how easy it may be

I work in legal tech (AI). No, it's not automating away work, much more work is being done to increase ability to do _interesting_ and otherwise challenging work (say, more efficient research loops, so a lawyer can uncover more legal connections between documents).

Our spinoff company (https://tramatm.com/) automates a lot of work around trademark registration/protection and the research that comes with that.[0]

They are new in the game but doing pretty well.

[0] https://vacuumlabs.com/blog/lifevacuum/how-to-build-a-google...