The New AI Workforce: Why Artificial Intelligence Is Creating More Jobs, Not Less

Lawyers generally charge by the hour, a concept that goes back as far as 1913. Reginald Heber Smith, counsel for the Boston Legal Aid Society, was passionate about making fairness and justice more accessible. Capped by a limited budget to fund and staff cases, he invented the timesheet – a form where lawyers could write down the name of the client, the name of the case, the work performed, and the time spent doing it. This daily time sheet was measured in six minute increments, designed to correspond with one-tenth of an hour. 

The billable hour was intended to be transparent to clients and fair for lawyers. It was also intended to provide justice and access to the poor. Up until that time, lawyers worked on flat-fee agreements or base fees at prices out of budget for most people. For example, Abraham Lincoln was paid $5,000 for his legal work for the Illinois Central Railroad – the modern equivalent of $187,733. 

The billable hour made legal services more financially accessible, which led to more demand for lawyers in general. While historical income data for lawyers between 1929 and 1948 does show some fluctuations in earnings based on what the market could bear, in general, demand rose steadily post-billable hour. This is Jevons Paradox: as efficiency makes a technology or service more affordable, there will be greater demand for it. This results in more work, not less. 

The Future of Law Includes AI

Since the price of hiring a lawyer is high, plenty of people leave their legal issues unresolved because of cost. It’s never been cheap to have someone argue on your behalf – but it’s still a service that many people will need at least once in their lives. Legal defenses or malpractice suits, for example, can be a necessary part of recovery after an accident or illness. However, many people won’t (or can’t) take on the financial burden of pursuing them. 

Today, technology is powering an increased amount of mass tort litigation and a need for more lawyers to defend it. AI can seek out claims, spot patterns, or search through piles of documents that would otherwise go unnoticed – resulting in more clients and more cases, although not necessarily more work. Technology makes it possible for legal teams to keep up with large cases, handling paperwork and organization while legal teams can make the most of their billable time. In enterprise cases especially, technology is making powerful shifts in how large cases are defended, settled, and argued. 

For the modern legal team, this means more time for lawyers to specialize in the highly skilled and detail oriented work that they perform – not stress about discovery. 

So is AI a job killer? Not for law firms. The cost of pursuing a case legally has often exceeded its value to the end user – but with AI tools speeding up case resolution and automation lowering costs, AI is giving lawyers more time to focus on practice. The end result is more cases, and more billable hours for your skilled team (even if they never charge as much as Abraham Lincoln!).

AI as a Work Multiplier Across Sectors

As artificial intelligence tools evolve, they are proving not to be job eliminators, but job transformers — especially within legal defense. Much like the introduction of the billable hour increased access to legal services and, ultimately, increased demand for lawyers, AI is accelerating workflows in a way that expands the total amount of work available.

Across industries, the rise of AI has led to the creation of entirely new roles. Prompt engineers, AI operations specialists, machine-learning auditors, and AI compliance experts are now in demand as organizations race to adopt intelligent systems responsibly and efficiently. Instead of shrinking the workforce, AI is reshaping it, shifting the skills employees need and opening doors to new career paths.

In the legal sector, particularly on the defense side,  AI is speeding up case resolution by helping firms process discovery, identify patterns, and manage documents at a pace impossible for human teams alone. Faster case processing means more cases can be opened, reviewed, and closed in the same amount of time. This does not reduce the need for lawyers; it increases it. Legal expertise is still the cornerstone of defense strategy, negotiation, and courtroom argument, and AI simply removes the administrative drag that once slowed teams down.

As cases move more quickly, firms find themselves able to take on higher volumes of work. For example, with the help of AI medical chronologies, one workers’ compensation legal defense firm automated 80% of their legal file review — without compromising on accuracy or compliance. This is the key distinction: AI does not replace lawyers; it multiplies their capacity. Lawyers can devote their time to specialized, high‑value tasks while AI manages the repeatable, time‑consuming components of case preparation.

Rather than a job killer, AI is a catalyst for greater workload, new skill development, and evolving career pathways. It strengthens the profession by giving legal teams more time to focus on the practice of law — not the paperwork behind it.