Opinion | AI isn’t the end of the legal profession. It’s the future.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/05/17/ai-isnt-end-legal-profession-its-future/

Publish Date: 2026-05-17 06:36:00

Damien Charlotin is a senior research fellow at HEC Paris and the author of the Substack “Artificial Authority.”

Pity the lawyers: Whenever people want to dramatize the impact of artificial intelligence on white-collar work, they tend to reach for the legal profession as Exhibit A. Mustafa Suleyman, head of Microsoft AI, opined in February that legal tasks “will be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” A headline on a March op-ed from Richard Susskind, an authority on the intersection of tech and law, blared that “artificial intelligence could replace traditional lawyers by 2035.” And as newer, more advanced tools promising to revolutionize the profession just keep coming — Anthropic recently expanded its AI assistant’s legal offerings — it’s easy to assume lawyers are on the brink of extinction.

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