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When Mark Opashinov began his career as a lawyer, he relied on fax machines, telephones and traditional mail to share documents and data.
The tools of the job have evolved dramatically over the 28 years since, from early word processors and scanners to email and cloud storage. Each innovation, he says, enabled legal professionals to do the many administrative components of their jobs a little faster.
“Now the expectation is, you say, ‘I’ve got this version of the agreement,’ and they say, ‘oh great, I’m in front of my computer, email it and we’ll look it over now,’” says Mr. Opashinov, now a partner at McMillan, a Toronto-based business law firm.
Though he’s seen many new tools speed up standard legal practices and procedures, Mr. Opashinov says the latest disruptive technology, generative artificial intelligence, feels different.
“It’s a sea change,” he says. “It’s going to change this profession and every profession. And it’s already doing it.”
In Mr. Opashinov’s view, generative AI is unlike the jump from ink to typewriter to word processor to email. It introduced an entirely new category of tools.
“In the early days, we called generative AI ‘Google on steroids’ – a supercharged search engine – but it’s not a search engine; It’s a reasoning engine,” he says. “That’s how I think of it in my day-to-day. Where could I engage a reasoning engine to help me with what I’m doing?”
The answer, according to Mr. Opashinov, are the many components of his job that involve the analysis or production of documents.
“I can upload a suite of documents and ask (the AI tool) questions about them, which is a substitute for printing everything out, (analyzing it) and putting sticky notes next to the relevant bits,” he says. “It’s great for drafting standard, typical documents – corporate resolutions, directions, receipts. It can give you a first draft to edit rather than starting with a blank page.”
Generative AI is having a dramatic impact on industries of all shapes and sizes, but there is a strong argument to be made that few have been as directly touched by the technology as law.
That’s because the industry is more document-heavy than most, with many of its practitioners dedicating a significant proportion of their time to the document management, production and analysis, work AI can now do faster and more thoroughly.
According to Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals Report 2025, legal professionals expect to free up nearly 240 hours per year – or about hours hours a week – by leveraging AI tools.
The introduction of generative AI doesn’t just offer legal practitioners the opportunity to do more in less time. It’s also changing client and employer expectations, forcing them to define the value they offer more clearly and may even threaten the long standard billable-hour compensation model.
“I think you’ll have to be more creative in [defining and communicating] your value-add, because value-add is what people really want to pay for,” says James Craig, the vice-president of financial planning for Bellwether Investment Management.
As an in-house tax lawyer for the Oakville-based estate and insurance services firm, Mr. Craig says he used to spend a lot more time drafting and reading documents; now AI tools do that for him.
By taking away the more tedious parts of his job, however, Craig says it’s put a bigger spotlight on the more intangible attributes legal practitioners bring to the table.
“It helps me because of the knowledge that I have,” he says. “I always tell people use the tool, but you’re still going to have to add your own flavour to it.”
That’s especially true when it comes to preventing issues related to hallucinations and inaccuracies. When the technology first became available some legal professionals found themselves in hot water when they cited non-existent cases dreamed up by a generative AI tool.
“Lawyers were using AI to generate court briefs, to draft written submissions and over-relying on AI in the sense that they were getting it to do too much of the work without understanding how it works,” says Robert Diab, a law professor at Thompson Rivers University. “I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that there’s a rash of these sorts of stories across North America.”
Prof. Diab says that when it first hit the market, generative AI was widely considered a dramatic disruptive force in the industry, but more recently lawyers have learned its limitations, sometimes in embarrassing ways. As a result, he’s not convinced AI will be as disruptive to the field as originally feared.
“The initial optimism about how much efficiency would result was overstated,” he says. “The reason is the vast majority of the time most lawyers spend on a file are doing things that cannot be delegated to AI; holding the client’s hand, talking to the other side’s lawyer, pouring over crucial documents, thinking about strategy, finessing a contract and so forth.”
Instead of displacing lawyers, or upending the industry in some dramatic way, Prof. Diab now believes the technology will instead put a premium on the distinct skills and experiences each practitioner can offer.
“Law is very much a human activity,” he says. “It’s not just rules, it’s not all black and white, so AI can help us in many ways, but I think increasingly lawyers are finding that beyond assistance with research and writing, there’s only so far it can take you.”