Legal Life: How to Replace a Lawyer in Ten Easy Emails

Legal Life: The Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs of the Everyday Attorney” is your monthly invitation to laugh, commiserate, and connect with the real stories behind life in the law. 

Every week, my inbox coughs up another “game-changing” offer to make my law practice “more efficient.” This week’s gem: “We’re working with law practices in scaling with global paralegals, support staff, and AI voice systems.” Translation: “Would you like to replace your bright, local legal team with robots and people you’ll never meet?”

If you’re a new attorney, here’s something law school didn’t teach you: a law office is a living ecosystem. The paralegal who knows every court clerk by name, the assistant who can e-file faster than you can open DocuSign, the senior associate who can smell a missing exhibit before you’ve even noticed it’s gone — that’s where you learn how to think like a lawyer. That’s the process that shapes judgment. And here’s the thing: today’s paralegal is tomorrow’s attorney. That’s how this profession grows.

When we start outsourcing all those development jobs — those “entry points” into the legal world — we’re not just cutting costs. We’re gutting the farm system. Every great litigator learned by watching great paralegals and mentors in action. You can’t “scale” that experience, and you can’t import the kind of wisdom that comes from sitting in a courtroom or scrambling before a filing deadline. If we outsource too much of that work, the next generation of lawyers will never learn how the work actually gets done. It’s like replacing med school with WebMD.

And don’t get me started on AI. I know the pitch: “Let technology handle the grunt work so you can focus on strategy.” But strategy is built from the grunt work. From seeing the patterns, tripping over the mistakes, and feeling the pressure firsthand. No AI knows what it’s like to stand in front of a judge who’s having a bad day, or the panic of realizing your witness just went rogue. Judgment isn’t coded, it’s earned.

I also don’t need an AI voice system answering my phones. I need a human being who can tell when the caller is about to cry, or when a tenant is too scared to speak. AI can mimic tone, but it can’t sense judgment, empathy, or ethics. And those things aren’t side features of the law — they are the law.

A local attorney I admire, Thomas Diachenko, often reminds people not to make jokes about lawyers. “We’re the protectors of truth, facts, and evidence,” he says. And he’s right. If truth and evidence ever get handed over wholesale to algorithms and anonymous virtual staff, we’re in trouble. Lawyers are the immune system of democracy. You can’t outsource that. You can’t download it. If people keep handing our work to machines, we won’t be protecting truth anymore, we’ll be validating API errors. 

To all the new attorneys trying to find balance between efficiency and authenticity: technology can be your ally, but it should never become your instinct. Law is learned by living it, from mentors, from mistakes, from people. Protect that process. 

So, no thanks, Global Hyper-Efficiency Multinational Paralegal Synergy Solutions Unlimited, LLC. I’ll keep my local paralegals. I’ll keep my real voices. I want my phone answered by someone who knows the difference between a Prejudgment Claim of Right to Possession and a pizza order. Because when we automate the human part of law, justice doesn’t just get streamlined, it gets silenced.

Stephanie S. Germani, Esq. practices landlord-tenant law and is constantly encouraging her assistants, who work remotely whenever they want, that their next step should be law school.