Law in the Era of AI

I recently picked up Bjarne P. Tellmann’s Law in the Era of AI. It’s a broad look at how AI is causing organizational change, but two takeaways stood out to me: first, survival hinges on fiercely defending your deep cognitive focus against operational noise; second, staying relevant requires completely reframing how you deliver commercial value.

1) The Cloister and the Starship

We have reached a juncture where AI can draft ninety-five percent of a standard corporate document in minutes (p.114). As Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon observed, this automation turns routine legal drafting into a commodity, leaving professional value concentrated entirely in the remaining five percent of strategic judgment (ibid). If lawyers outsource early-stage comprehension to machine summaries, they risk cognitive atrophy and lose the capacity to execute that high-value final tier.

Niall Ferguson proposed balancing this dynamic through cloisters and starships (p.248). The starship represents the high-speed, machine-enabled environment of automated drafting and data processing, and the cloister refers to dedicated, tech-free environments designed to preserve focus, analytical writing, and deep reading (ibid). Ferguson’s call for cloisters directly reinforces the concept of the Reading Sanctuary I explored in my Attensity post (without deliberate physical and mental boundaries, we risk "human fracking", or depleting our capacity for deep strategic analysis in favor of low-value, shallow processing).

Lawyers cannot delegate the duty of deep study. We must protect uninterrupted blocks of time in the Reading Sanctuary to absorb complex material before letting digital tools take over the execution.

2) Escaping the Innovation Trap via JTBD

Many lawyers respond to disruption by automating clunky, legacy processes (p.215). Clayton Christensen termed this the "innovation trap," where organizations use technology to make outdated methods faster rather than reinventing the model (p.132). In legal practice, we fall into this trap whenever we deploy AI merely to draft legacy documents faster, missing the opportunity to redesign how risk and deal terms are delivered entirely.

The danger is merely building a faster horse-and-buggy (p.124). Theodore Levitt’s classic advice holds: customers do not buy drills; they buy holes in the wall (p. 145-6). Tellmann notes that as the rest of the enterprise digitizes into "AI factories" (e.g., marketing generating hundreds of automated campaign variations in days), a legal department relying on manual, bespoke, forty-page contract reviews becomes an intolerable bottleneck (p.70). To escape this trap, practitioners must apply the Jobs to Be Done framework ("JTBD") (p.143). JTBD forces us to look past the product we produce and focus on the fundamental outcome the client is trying to achieve.

In modern commercial practice, we have to take that logic one step further: our business partners rarely even want the hole. They want the picture hung on the wall (p. 146).

Clients do not engage in-house counsel to receive dense legal treatises. The contract is just the drill; risk mitigation is just the hole. The actual job to be done is closing a viable commercial relationship safely and at the speed of the business. When a contract becomes an operational roadblock, it fails the job it was hired to do, no matter how fast AI helped draft it.

True legal value isn't about selling faster drills. It’s about matching enterprise velocity, and taking responsibility for 'hanging the picture'.

Law in the Era of AI: Clients, Firms, and the Future of the Legal Industry Tellmann, Bjarne P., 2026, Book , 332 pages; 9781394375714, 1394375719