At every legal technology conference, the same promise rings out: AI will automate the drudgery so lawyers can focus on what really matters. While it's a seductive vision, it's also contradicted by the best research we have on what actually happens when knowledge workers adopt these tools

Key points:

• • • The productivity promise is largely wrong — Emerging research shows that AI doesn’t reduce work — it intensifies it. Lawyers work faster, take on broader responsibilities, and extend their hours without recognizing the expansion. Further, because prompting AI feels like chatting rather than laboring, lawyers slip work into evenings and weekends without registering it as additional effort.

    • Self-reinforcing acceleration is the real risk — AI speeds tasks, which raises expectations, which increases reliance, which expands scope, ultimately creating a cycle that drives burnout in a profession already plagued by it.

    • Purposeful integration is the antidote — Legal organizations need to promote intentional governance structures that account for how people actually behave with AI, not how leadership imagines they will or should.

Welcome back to The AI Law Professor. Last month, I examined how AI is forcing us to rethink training for junior lawyers. This month, I examine a question that affects every lawyer: What happens when the efficiency gains we’ve been promised don’t materialize the way we expected? A recent study out of UC-Berkeley suggests the answer is...

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