The loudest promise in legal AI right now is speed. Faster review. Faster drafting. Faster research. This is where the industry keeps pointing its intelligence, and it’s exactly how it walks into what Erik Brynjolfsson calls the Turing Trap . The trap appears when an industry optimizes for automation instead of augmentation. Automation means replicating what humans already do, just cheaper and faster. Augmentation means creating capabilities that never existed at all. Legal t

“AI will kill all the lawyers” is the kind of headline that travels fast because it flatters a simple story. The Spectator piece does exactly that. It gestures at real capabilities, then leaps to an absolute. The problem isn’t that AI is useless for lawyering. It’s that usefulness is being mistaken for replacement. The work begins where rules stop being obvious. I believe issue spotting is the core activity, and it is not only pattern recognition. It is creative. It requires