Connecting...
Have you heard about the 9 Joke Theory? The idea that if you repeat a joke enough times, it becomes funny again, not because of the content, but because of the sheer audacity of your persistence.
We’ve mapped it onto the ChatGPT discourse: the rise of AI, the cool novelty, the backlash, the trust collapse… and now the awkward chuckle of realisation that the machine might be learning more from us than we bargained for.
But now, let’s take this one step further.
Let’s bring it home to the legal services profession, where the joke, quite possibly, has gone too far—and we’ve all become the punchline.
Jokes 1–3: The Novelty
At first, AI in law was charming. A digital assistant here, a smart search there. Tools like Lexis+ AI and CoCounsel offered support with research, document review, and summarisation. Efficiency. Productivity. Clients were impressed. Associates were relieved.
Jokes 4–6: The Creep
Then it grew. ChatGPT could now help junior lawyers draft memos, generate standard clauses, and prep client notes. Suddenly, that “quick first draft” wasn’t coming from a grad—it was spat out by an algorithm in 11 seconds.
Firms started whispering: Why hire three juniors when you can get a licence for one AI?
Jokes 7–8: The Unease
Now we’re here. The eighth beat. Unease has replaced excitement. Not just over privacy, or whether AI is training itself on sensitive case data. The deeper concern is structural:
If AI is doing all the “basic” legal work, who exactly is learning how to be a lawyer?
And there it is. The ninth joke. Not quite funny. But painfully clear.
Legal training has always been a long game. Junior lawyers learn by doing—drafting, redrafting, proofreading, sitting through meetings that feel too long until one day they make sense.
If AI automates this foundational work, what’s left for the junior lawyer? Being thrown into a client matter with no grounding? Reading AI output and “vibing” whether it’s right?
Imagine learning to be a surgeon by reviewing AI-generated surgery notes without ever holding a scalpel.
AI is flattening the knowledge hierarchy. But flattening isn’t the same as nurturing. Law firms are in danger of severing the very pipeline that produces their future partners, general counsel, judges, and thought leaders.
If all the grunt work—the boring, basic, beautiful slog—is done by machines, how will the next generation develop the intuition, resilience, and judgement that comes only from experience?
They won’t.
And when today’s partners eventually retire, we’ll be left with a cohort of professionals who’ve been standing next to the engine but never learned how to drive.
Ironically, while AI hoovers up legal tasks, it’s also creating risk. The ninth joke, again, is on us.
Client confidentiality: If firm-wide systems or junior staff are using public-facing AI tools, sensitive data may be leaking into black-box models.
Ethics and professional duties: Who owns the legal advice when it’s AI-assisted? Who’s liable for hallucinated clauses?
Reputation: Clients are starting to ask not if you use AI—but how. And they want transparency, not techno-smooth talk.
The legal profession thrives on trust, discretion, and human judgement. When machines stand in as surrogates, that trust begins to erode.
Yes. But only if law firms are bold enough to step off the conveyor belt before the 10th repetition.
1. Reframe AI as Apprenticeship Support—not Replacement
Use AI to accelerate learning, not bypass it. Give juniors the AI output—then ask them to challenge it, rewrite it, explain it. Make them think, not click.
2. Reinvest in Human-Centric Training
Bring back the second seat. The long internal memo. The client call with no agenda but to observe. Double down on mentoring, not just AI training sessions.
3. Elevate Digital Literacy to Professional Literacy
Being a 21st-century lawyer means understanding not just how AI works, but when to say, “That’s not good enough.” AI doesn’t know the client’s politics, pressures, or preferences. Lawyers do.
The 9 Joke Theory is funny because of its truth: repetition reveals absurdity. But in the legal profession, we’re now realising that over-reliance on AI has stopped being clever, and started being careless.
It’s time to stop laughing and start planning. Not just for productivity, but for the preservation of the very thing that makes law… law.
Human nuance. Hard-won judgement. And the grind that turns rookies into rainmakers.
Because if we joke our way past that, there may be no one left who knows when to stop.
