The promise has become a mantra: AI will free lawyers from drudgery so they can focus on higher-value work. Thomas Martin, writing for the Thomson Reuters Institute, points to research from UC-Berkeley that complicates that story considerably. The study tracked what actually happens when knowledge workers adopt generative AI. They don’t work less. They work more — faster, broader, longer — often without realizing it.
For a profession already deep in a burnout crisis, Martin argues, this should be a wake-up call.
I can confirm the finding from the inside. I use generative AI extensively — Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT — across research, drafting, and analysis. On routine tasks, yes, AI saves time. But on the projects that matter most, I consistently invest more time, not less. The reason is simple: AI has raised my ambition. When a power tool lets you chase a higher quality ceiling, you chase it. The scope of what feels achievable expands, and you expand with it.
The additional time is worth it. The output is genuinely better — more thorough, more polished, more carefully reasoned. But that’s precisely the dynamic the Berkeley researchers identified. The efficiency gains don’t translate into free hours. They get reinvested immediately, almost invisibly, into more demanding work.
This has implications the legal profession hasn’t seriously grappled with. If AI doesn’t reduce workload but intensifies it, then the firms and institutions selling AI adoption as a path to better work-life balance are telling an incomplete story. The real question — the one Martin rightly flags — is whether we’ll make deliberate choices about how AI reshapes legal work, or simply let the tools quietly raise the bar until the new pace feels normal.