Sixty-two per cent of legal work needs a purpose-built tool, the largest middle band of any group in the economy, and only 10 per cent is reachable with a chat window today.
Exposure means published research judged an AI could halve the time a task takes, at the same quality. It is not a prediction about any job. How to read this
Ten per cent reachable today, 61 per cent needing a tool built first, 29 per cent protected. No other group is that heavily concentrated in the middle.
It is also the smallest group in the report at seven occupations and 125 tasks, so read the figures as a sketch rather than a portrait.
Lawyers: 14 per cent reachable today, 18 per cent protected. Judicial Law Clerks are the least protected occupation in the group at 16 per cent. Judges are the most protected at 57 per cent.
The seniority ladder does almost nothing here until you reach the bench, where the work becomes deciding rather than preparing.
Solid is reachable with a chat window today, pale needs software building first, grey cannot be sped up. Task counts are shown because several of these rest on fewer than twenty.
Every People team has a point where a question becomes a legal one. This chapter says that the work on the other side of that handover has the same shape as yours: a large band of things a tool could do that no tool does yet.
Which is a reason to be careful with any AI answer to an employment law question, and a reason not to assume the lawyer has better tooling than you do.
There is no data here on what anybody actually does with AI. A dataset that appears to measure it was removed from this report because its meaning could not be stated. The reasoning is on the limits page.
The exposure ratings cover all 125 tasks in these 7 occupations with no gaps, and were made in 2023 against the model capabilities of that year. Read every figure as a floor.
Exposure ratings from Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, GPTs are GPTs: Labor market impact potential of LLMs, Science 384, 1306–1308, 2024, used under the MIT licence. This page includes information from the O*NET Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. People Team AI has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications. Employment figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.