As artificial intelligence reshapes the legal industry, a quiet but fundamental shift is underway in how lawyers create value for the businesses they serve.
Writing in Above the Law, lawyer and author Olga V. Mack argues that one of the biggest surprises of her in-house career was realising how rarely anyone actually wants “the legal answer.”
Early in a legal career, the instinct is to assume the best lawyers are those who can analyse issues most precisely and identify hidden risks fastest, with total intellectual confidence.
Law school rewards that instinct, and so do law firms, reinforcing a model where correctness and doctrinal precision are treated as the highest measures of professional worth.
But Mack argues that over time, particularly in in-house roles, a more uncomfortable reality emerges about where legal work actually generates its greatest value for a business.
AI is now accelerating that realisation by compressing the time it takes to produce research, analysis, contract comparisons, risk summaries, and drafted language down to seconds.
When AI can generate analyses, summarise regulations, identify clauses, and surface risks almost instantly, answers themselves stop being scarce, and the profession must locate its value elsewhere.
Mack is direct about where that value moves: “Answers themselves are becoming abundant. And when answers become abundant, the profession starts shifting value elsewhere. Increasingly, I think that ‘elsewhere’ is judgment.”
Judgment, as she defines it, is not about memorising doctrine but about prioritisation, tradeoffs, timing, consequences, and aligning legal decisions with the broader goals of the business.
Two lawyers can examine the same legal issue and recommend entirely different courses of action, and the gap between them is usually not legal knowledge but the quality of their judgment.
What makes this transition particularly challenging is how informally lawyers have historically developed judgment, absorbing it by watching senior colleagues navigate difficult situations and sitting through tense meetings.
Junior lawyers have traditionally built instincts through repetitive work that serves a dual purpose, functioning as both productive output and slow developmental training in professional reasoning.
Mack warns that outsourcing too much reasoning to AI too early carries a real danger of preventing lawyers from developing judgment altogether, replacing active thinking with intellectual passivity.
She already sees signs of this, with people accepting AI outputs too quickly, failing to interrogate assumptions, and stopping at the first plausible answer rather than exploring alternatives.
However, Mack sees a more optimistic possibility that she believes receives far too little attention in the profession’s ongoing debate about automation and replacement.
She argues that AI, if used thoughtfully, could actually accelerate the development of judgment by exposing legal reasoning in ways that have historically been very difficult to scale across a workforce.
The deeper challenge for the legal profession is not whether AI replaces lawyers but whether the profession can deliberately redesign how judgment is taught, developed, and rewarded in a world where answers are cheap.