The Algorithm Does Not Know What It Feels Like to Lose a Client

I have been practicing law for over thirty five years. I have drafted contracts in the small hours of the morning, negotiated across tables where the silences mattered more than the words, and watched careers pivot on the strength of a single well-placed clause. So when people ask me what I think about artificial intelligence reshaping the future of work, I do not answer as a technologist. I answer as someone who has spent three decades learning what no machine has yet learned to replicate: the weight of human consequence.

That said, I use AI. I use it every day. And it has made me sharper, faster, and more considered in ways I did not expect.

The Tool That Made Me Think Harder

There is a common anxiety running through professional circles right now. It goes something like this: AI will take our jobs, hollow out our expertise, and reduce decades of hard-won judgment to a prompt and a response. I understand the anxiety. I do not fully share it.

What I have found, in practice, is that AI does not replace thinking. It raises the bar for it. When a tool can produce a competent first draft in seconds, the question is no longer whether you can produce one. The question is whether you can tell the difference between competent and excellent, and whether you have the depth to close that gap.

That kind of discernment is not algorithmic. It is cultivated. It comes from years of getting things wrong, sitting with the consequences, and adjusting. No model trains on that texture of experience. It trains on data. Data is the record of what happened. Wisdom is the understanding of why it mattered.

What the Future of Work Actually Demands

My answer is always the same, and it surprises people with its plainness.

Judgment. Communication. The capacity to sit across from another human being and understand what they actually need, as distinct from what they have said they need. The ability to take responsibility when something goes wrong, not to deflect it toward a process or a system. These are not soft skills in the dismissive sense. They are the hardest skills there are. They take the longest to develop. And they are precisely what AI cannot perform, only simulate.

The future of work will belong to people who know how to work with AI without being diminished by it. That means knowing what to hand off and what to hold. It means staying curious enough to keep learning the tools, and grounded enough not to confuse the tools with the craft.

The Longer View

I think often about what it means to have built a career across decades rather than across quarters. The legal profession, at its best, is a long game. Reputation compounds. Trust is earned in increments and lost in moments. The relationships that have sustained my practice were not optimized. They were tended.

That orientation, the willingness to think in years rather than cycles, may be the most undervalued professional quality of this particular moment. When everything accelerates, the person who can hold a steady, long view becomes quietly indispensable.

AI will continue to evolve faster than any of us can fully track. The work it cannot do is the work that has always been hardest to do: to show up fully, to care about the outcome, to carry the weight of what you have promised.

That part remains entirely human. And I would argue it always will.