I’m going to give you an unpopular opinion warning here because what I’m about to say is certainly controversial in February 2026. Although I think that while I’m often wrong, I have a lot of conviction in my concern that in the next 18 months, there are going to be lots of lawyers who are going to lose their jobs due to AI. And this is due to the market forces that are, I think, undeniably upon us, at least or will be very shortly. So for a long time, I was a partner at a large law firm, and I can tell you that in a typical AmLaw 200 law firm, there’s four to seven lawyers for everyone equity partner. And that assumes a ratio that assumes an economy built on human billable hours. And most lawyers barely notice what is going on right now with AI. They see it as something for legal research and they assume that’s the whole story, but it isn’t.

Research is the smallest use case. And already in February 2026, a lot of the work that is typically done by young associates is becoming made so much more efficient through AI. And it’s not like if all of the first, second, and third year associates become twice as efficient and they’ve got twice as much extra time on their hands, that the large law firms are just going to be able to backfill their time by going out and getting more of the work that big law firms typically do. There’s a limited amount of that work. So what is likely to happen here? Well, look, law firms are not going to sit around and pay a bunch of younger lawyers to be idle, particularly when the expense of the human capital at a law firm’s salary is the largest expense that they have. They’re going to cut some of those lawyers loose.

But more importantly, I think that what some of the intrepid law firms out there are going to realize is that if they’re able to significantly diminish their cost base, they could go ahead and lower their pricing in a way that would allow them to grab a greater share of the market and to get new business. So while everybody’s talked about the death of the billable hour for years, and certainly most of the work that I’ve done in my law firm from 2019 to 2026 has been billable hour, I think that there’s a potential for a lot of good-sized law firms out there to go out and say, okay, well, if we’re able to cut our expenses down so that it’s only 70% of what it used to be, what would stop us from taking a piece of litigation where we would typically charge a client $10 million and say, “You know what?

We’ll just flat fee it at eight and a half million dollars or something like that and know that they just reduce their cost structure by 30% and they’re going to be able to have a smaller number of partners that are going to be able to keep a larger relative proportion of the fee and go to the market and undercut all the firms that still want to bill hourly and just flat fee the same $10 million piece of litigation at eight and a half million or whatever.” And I think that here’s the key point. Once the handful of intrepid law firms out there have said, “You know what? We can get the same work done with less lawyers leveraging AI and we can reduce our capital expenditures. We can reduce the cost side of the equation.” Less lawyers can share a little bit less money and keep a greater percentage of it.

When they go to the market, they’re going to grab all this market share and all the rest of the firms out there that are still burdened by the high cost of all this human capital that isn’t necessary anymore, those same ones that want to bill hourly and do businesses they always have, they’re going to have to rush to follow the market leaders or they’re going to lose other clients. And so I think that when that reality becomes obvious to clients and partners, a highly leveraged model that we’re used to unwinds fast. And so it’s not a desire for flat fees, it’s market forces, not vision or strategy that’s going to push law firms towards leaner teams and I believe flat fee consultancy type pricing. And once a few firms prove that it works, the rest are going to have to follow. And here’s the twist, many lawyers that don’t realize that they’re at risk are going to get displaced quickly, but I think a lot of them are going to discover something positive that they never imagined.

And that is freedom and better economics and the unexpected upside of building something of their own. And so I have a positive vision for the future. I think that the next 18 months from now, and we are in February 2026, and I hope that I’m wrong, is going to see 10%, 20%, 30% of lawyers losing their jobs. I think they’re going to find themselves in a position where they are going to have not just a need to start their own firms, but the opportunity to. And I think that they’re going to find freedom and opportunity and happiness in ways that they never thought to look for. And so I think the shock is going to come soon. I’m predicting 18 months. The opportunity is going to follow just as fast for those who are ready to seize it. And so if you are listening to this, presumably, you’re already thinking about breaking free from the law firm that you work for and starting your own thing.

You might want to think about whether or not you’re going to be able to beat to market a lot of these lawyers that are going to get displaced, a lot of these people who are going to get caught flatfooted and now might be a really opportune time for you to get yourself ready to take advantage of the opportunity that’s coming. It’s not all that different than … I started my law firm in October 2019, and within six months, we were staggered globally with COVID. And it was a great time for me to be set up in a way that I was lean and I was nimble and I was already good with video and I was good with remote. And so it was luck. I mean, if you would’ve told me in late 2019 that we were going to have a pandemic of that scale, I probably would’ve gone running back to my old law firm.

But when everybody got locked up at home and everybody was forced to go digital, I found that I was so lucky to have spent some time setting up that capability. And I think that it’s the same thing now. I think that what you don’t want to do, if you’re thinking about starting a law firm is wait a couple years because I think there’s going to be a tremendous amount of competition. A lot of people involuntarily are going to have to start their own law firms. And if you’re thinking about getting out ahead of them and thinking about setting up your capabilities so that you’re not part of that herd, that’s something that you really want to make consider. So if this is something that you’re thinking about doing in a year or two or three from now, and you’re sitting here in 2016 or early 2017 thinking about this, I think now might be the time for you to get a little bit of first mover advantage over a lot of people that might want to compete with you for work for reasons that they may not wish to think about right now.

And so now might be a great time for you to go ahead and make that jump or at least commit to doing so and to build up your capabilities for your own law firm while it’s still something that’s voluntary and something that you can lean into as opposed to something that might be forced upon you by market forces.