Will AI take my job?

Picture a Tuesday morning at a law firm. A paralegal opens their laptop and watches an AI tool draft in seconds what used to take them an hour. They don't say a word. But they're thinking:

Is this thing going to steal my job?

These days, there's so much excitement and anxiety around AI. One of the greatest fears, though, is that it will take the jobs of knowledge workers.

For the support staff of a law firm, that fear isn't abstract. They're watching tasks they used to own get automated and taken over, one after another.

I've helped renovate multiple businesses to be AI-first, including law firms.

Here's what I've learned: to become a law firm of the future, you have to think about the people first; the AI tools come second.

Start with a bright future

Let's zoom out and think about psychology. For any human being, the single most important factor for mental health is a bright future.

A person with no hope has nothing to fight for or live for. At best, they cling to the status quo. At worst, they feel like they have nothing left to fight for at all.

As leaders, one of our top roles with our team is to keep helping them see and believe in the bright future that exists for them, for their role, and for the business at large.

Now think about how AI sounds to a teammate. A machine comes in, takes my job, removes my livelihood, and threatens my ability to provide for myself and the people I care about. That is the opposite of a bright future. Understandably so.

So our first step here isn't picking an AI tool. Our first task is to secure a bright future for our teammates.

The RIQ Reflection Exercise

I've run this reflection exercise with no fewer than nine teams.

In every instance, it proved incredibly effective. It's a writing exercise. In total, it takes about 20 minutes, and it can be some of the most important 20 minutes of your entire year.

Getting this right can unlock incredible new enthusiasm in your team (instead of fear) and win over your team to take advantage of the best parts of AI.

This writing exercise is founded on identifying the tasks in your firm that AI can't replace. Even better, these tasks are often exciting new projects that allow your team to do more exciting and interesting work too.

The three areas AI can't replace are:

• Relationships
• Innovation
• Quality Control

To begin, have every teammate grab a writing tool. Could be a pen and paper or a Google Doc. It doesn't matter.

What does matter is focus. Tell your teammates to prepare their workspace to prevent distractions. Close the door to their office. If on a computer, close down all email, messaging, social media, etc. Silence all notifications, too. Set their phones to Do Not Disturb.

Once everybody's ready, we begin.

The three questions

Each question gets 5 minutes of focused writing time. Put a clock up. Everyone writes quietly.

Question 1: Relationships

"If I gave you 10 hours a week to focus just on improving the relationships that our team has, what would you build, change, or remove?"

Keep in mind, relationships could be:

• Internal, with one another.
• With our prospects and clients.
• With investors or lenders.
• With important vendors and suppliers.

Everyone quietly makes a list of what they'd do if they had lots of extra time to improve those relationships. When time is up, do not discuss answers. Just move to the second question.

Question 2: Innovation

"If you had 10 hours a week to focus just on innovation in the firm, what would you do?"

Keep in mind, innovation could be:

• Receiving or giving training on a particular topic to get better at something.
• Improving a key process, such as client intake.
• Innovating on tools. Maybe there's a tool you want to learn, or an AI workflow you want to design and deploy.
• Offering a new product or service to customers.
• Calling all of our past customers and asking how they're doing now that it's been a few months or a few years since they last hired us.

Then move to the final question.

Question 3: Quality control

"If you had 10 hours a week to focus just on quality control, what would you do differently?"

Keep in mind, quality control could be:

• Double-checking certain work before it goes live.
• Reviewing an old website, template, or checklist to see how it could be updated.
• Figuring out where in our process we need better checks and balances, so we catch issues and errors early.

Dream widely

At the Walt Disney Company, part of their magic is they developed the Disney Creative Strategy.

In this strategy, they define three different phases and, literally, meeting types:

• Dreamer: pure imagination and possibility. In these meetings, wild ideas are encouraged, constraints are ignored, and criticism is not allowed.
• Realist: in this second kind of meeting, it's all about converting big ideas into plans. We still aren't critiquing. We're stretching our thinking to say, "How could we…?" And related questions like, "What resources would we need?" "What would the timeline be?" "Who would do what?"
• Critic: now, and only now, do we get into what could go wrong. In this kind of meeting, we're looking for weaknesses, risks, missing assumptions, secondary consequences, and reasons why our plan might fail. Crucially, the Critic critiques the plan, not the people.

Based on this sequence — Dreamer → Realist → Critic — we now have a well-rounded concept. Based on the critical feedback in phase three, we can then strengthen, modify, or perhaps reject the plan altogether.

Coming back to our RIQ exercise, tell the team this is a "Dreamer" exercise, not a Realist or Critic exercise. We want to dream broadly. When starting this exercise, tell them not to hold back or be concerned with logistics or any other constraint.

Adding sparkle to their eye

Every single time I've done this exercise, every person has an added sparkle in their eye.

They've just identified a few dozen ways they could create new solutions and opportunities for the team. Dozens of ways they could improve. Dozens of ways they can make life better and unlock everyone to grow, personally and professionally.

Have team members share their top 3–5 items on their list. Lead the group in sharing their ideas. Again, preface the discussion by reminding everyone that we're in Dreamer mode, not Realist or Critic.

Then your role shifts

Run your team through this exercise and you'll find they're suddenly vastly more open to whatever AI initiatives you have in mind. At that point, your leadership moves into a new role: helping them see:

• What could be delegated to AI.
• What sequence to delegate it in.
• How soon to do it.
• What collaborations between team members should happen.
• What AI tools to use.

This is where the Realist and Critic phases kick in. A perfect time to do that is during a planning meeting, whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

The details on how to do that are a topic for another article. For now, let's just make sure your team sees a bright future first.

"CEO for a day"

Oftentimes, we just never give our team the chance to be the proverbial "CEO for a day" — to dream big, and share fully what they're seeing at the firm.

We all miss out dearly on the wisdom and perspective they've got, and continue to gain every day.

The RIQ Reflection Exercise does exactly that. In my experience, it's common to complete the exercise and have at least a few teammates ask if they can start working on those items ASAP. It's really cool to witness teammates light up!

Ultimately, everyone gets present to the extraordinary opportunities waiting six inches in front of their nose. And they realize that's the work they could be doing if they weren't stuck doing repetitive, robotic work.

I don't think that AI is about robots taking over human tasks. In fact, I think it's just the opposite:

Humans have been doing robot tasks for too long. Now it's time for robots to do robot tasks so humans can fully focus on doing human tasks.

Here's to the law firm of the future,
Tim