June 24, 2026
At least when it comes to access to justice and the future of our legal profession, that is where I am landing with AI at the end of this series about implementing my 2026 Resolution for the Legal Profession.
To be clear, the sense of AI Overwhelm that I wrote about last summer–and that permeates the REM classic from 40 years ago that is the inspiration for the title of this post–is as real as ever, and I won’t go so far as to say that I feel fine about it all. There is a lot not to like about AI, and please raise your hand if you are not at least mildly alarmed by what it may do to humanity.
Whatever we think about AI, though, that genie is out of the bottle and spreading rapidly, and it offers our profession an unprecedented opportunity to transform access to justice for the better if we play our cards right.
The Backdrop to this Year’s Resolution
This year’s Resolution starts with recognizing that, at a time when we have a record number of lawyers practicing in Illinois and throughout the country, most Americans struggle to find affordable legal help when they need it.
This has been true for many years now and is simply untenable, and as I said at the outset of this series, it is almost like our legal profession is asking to be disrupted. Well, here comes AI to do just that, and this year’s Resolution for our legal profession was to embrace the opportunity AI presents and use it to help shape a better future for both lawyers and the people who depend on our services.
A Brief Recap of the Action Plan to Implement the Resolution
My action plan for the Resolution is broken down into five separate but interrelated steps that are each necessary to make it a success.
1. Start From the Perspective of People Looking for Legal Help
Recognizing the enormous gap in access to affordable legal help today, we need to be clear-eyed about when people can effectively do things on their own, when they most need the help of a lawyer, and how much lawyer they need. “Access to justice” is not one problem we are trying to solve; it is a wide range of legal problems of varying degrees that people face every day that should be met with a corresponding continuum of potential solutions.
Diagnosing what people need starts with assessing the nature of the legal problem that a person is facing and its impact on them to determine the right legal intervention.
The level of assistance someone may need ranges from legal information and self-help solutions on one end of that continuum to full representation on the other, with many service options in between.
As detailed in Step One of the Action Plan, AI has the potential to vastly improve access to assistance across the continuum, starting with helping people understand what level of legal help they need and where they can find it, and then enabling lawyers and other legal professionals to deliver that legal help more efficiently and cost-effectively to more people who need it.
2. Leave the billable hour in the rearview mirror
If you never billed by the hour in the first place or have since seen the light, that puts you way ahead of the curve in adapting to the widespread changes and the many opportunities that AI is creating for our profession. It is no coincidence that the areas where we are seeing the most productive use of AI so far are corporate law departments, personal injury practices, and legal aid. The common denominator of those three groups is that none of them bill by the hour, and they all have every incentive to work as efficiently as possible.
For everyone else, ditching the billable hour is a good thing for all concerned and a good thing for access to justice. The case for leaving the billable hour in the dustbin of history has long been a strong one, yet it has proven to be remarkably persistent. What is different now with the advent of AI, however, is that it is becoming a business imperative to move to alternate means of pricing that better reflect the enduring value good lawyers provide.
Not sure where to start in the shift to value-based pricing? Check out Lauren Lester and Mathew Kerbis, and the new platform Mathew launched for subscription fee practices called Practi. While there are modest fees to get full access to Lauren and Mathew’s wisdom on running a successful modern law practice, those small investments can really help you jumpstart your pricing strategy. One of Lauren’s recent posts is particularly helpful in thinking about how you can get started.
3. Focus on the unique and enduring value we provide as lawyers
With knowledge of what clients need when they are looking for legal help, and with our minds freed of the billable hour (or never clouded by it to begin with), we can focus on the enduring value we provide as lawyers and how we can more affordably and effectively deliver that value to more people who need our help.
Step Three of the Action Plan talks more about the types of value good lawyers will always bring to the table: our counsel, advocate, and navigator roles. Centering the practice of law around these unique and enduring areas of value and the other ways we can always provide value to clients (e.g., great customer service) is where the rubber will meet the road to a better future for both our profession and for access to justice.
4. Responsibly build AI into the practice of law
As underscored throughout this series, AI is not coming for our jobs, but it is coming for many of our tasks. While most of us have already seen technology fundamentally change the way we practice law over time (e.g., once ubiquitous tasks like document review and legal research by book), AI is like technology on steroids in the transformative change it is bringing to the practice of law.
Step Four in the Action Plan outlined some concrete steps for thinking about how AI can help make law practices more efficient, effective, and accessible for the clients who need our help.
While the use cases will vary a bit depending on your particular practice area, I again point you to the wisdom of the aforementioned Lauren Lester and Mathew Kerbis as two good examples, and this recent article about the ways firms are using AI today also offers good food for thought.
If you are newer to AI and not sure how to get started, Lauren is hosting a free webinar in July that looks great.
5. Give people reliable and vetted tools to find appropriate legal help for their issues
As our profession grapples with how to ethically and effectively integrate AI into the practice of law, we also need to recognize that more people every day are turning to AI to navigate legal issues on their own.
That trend is only going to grow from here, and we need to take the lead in helping people make good decisions about using AI. That should include providing them with practical guidance on using AI (including realistic warnings and accountability for misuse) as well as creating legally vetted AI tools that people can have confidence in turning to for legal guidance.
I talked more about this on Step Five of the Action Plan, and this recent webinar from the National Center on State Courts is a good place to start in thinking about this challenge, which will need to be one of the top priorities for access to justice advocates for the foreseeable future.
The Courts Also Have a Central Role to Play
While the focus of this year’s Resolution and series has been on how our profession can use the disruption of AI to make our services more affordable and accessible, the courts also have a critical role to play in using AI to improve access.
I discussed some of the many opportunities for the courts on this front in a post last year, and the National Center on State Courts has partnered with the Thompson Reuters Institute to develop a central hub for courts tackling these issues.
Onward in 2026 and Beyond
AI is not the end of the world for lawyers and the justice system, but it is the end of the world as we know it.
For most of us in the profession, the disruption that AI is bringing to the practice of law may not be apparent just yet. But it indeed is coming to us all and now is the time to get out in front of it. Given the huge market failure in access to legal services that is the backdrop for this year’s Resolution, AI offers us an unprecedented opportunity to improve access to justice in big ways.
It is incumbent on us, both individually in our work and collectively as trustees of the justice system, to embrace this opportunity. And I am confident we are up to it.