CBA Record January-February 2026

THE YOUNG LAWYERS SECTION

Meet the New Legal Crisis. It’s the Same as the Old One. By Andrew P. Stevens

I remember clerking in Judge James N. O’Hara’s courtroom in the Circuit Court of Cook County when social media discovery became hot around 2014. The defense bar suddenly believed they were entitled to a plaintiff’s entire digi tal existence: every direct message, like, comment, sub-tweet, and blurry brunch photo. Not surprisingly, the plaintiffs’ bar believed the defense was entitled to noth ing, claiming “private,” “personal,” and “irrelevant.” As usual, the answer lived where most good legal answers do—in the middle. What’s relevant to the claim or defense is discoverable, and what isn’t… isn’t. The proportionality backbone of federal Rule 26(b)(1) didn’t change just because tech nology did. Artificial intelligence is the same old movie with the same plot and theme, but the remake is now set in a different decade with new cast members. It’s new,

it’s novel, it’s exciting and confusing—but not really. We’ve already done this with email, electronically stored information, technology-assisted review, social media, and Zoom court. We’ll do it again with AI. Those who will prevail are the ones who can see that time is a flat circle. We’ve heard a “lawyers are doomed” TED Talk for every tool since Westlaw. Each time, the tool didn’t erase lawyers; it erased busywork and exposed who was billing for it. The real question is whether AI changes the velocity of good lawyering. Early empirical work says, “Yes, gen erative tools can boost quality and cut time across ability levels for certain writ ing and analysis tasks.” That’s not vendor copy; it’s randomized evidence from MIT research (Noy & Zhang) and a large field experiment at Boston Consulting Group Is AI Taking Our Jobs? Only the inefficient parts.

with Harvard collaborators. The 2003 paper titled Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence shows big gains on the right kinds of tasks and uncovers the risks of the wrong ones. Translation: leverage increases, but judgment still matters. If your practice can be replicated by a predictive model, it probably should be. For the rest of us, machine learning is a power assist. The firms and in-house teams that win the AI race will redeploy attorney hours toward strategy, nuance, and client counseling and stop pretend ing cite-checking was the brain-busting craft that should be billed at hundreds of dollars an hour. What is AI’s Place in the Law? AI already has a place in the law, under the rules we already know. Competence (Model Rule 1.1) has long implied technological competence;

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