Thomson Reuters, tom Martin – “At every legal technology conference, the same promise rings out: AI will automate the drudgery so lawyers can focus on what really matters. While it’s a seductive vision, it’s also contradicted by the best research we have on what actually happens when knowledge workers adopt these tools.

Key points:

• The productivity promise is largely wrong — Emerging research shows that AI doesn’t reduce work — it intensifies it. Lawyers work faster, take on broader responsibilities, and extend their hours without recognizing the expansion. Further, because prompting AI feels like chatting rather than laboring, lawyers slip work into evenings and weekends without registering it as additional effort.
• Self-reinforcing acceleration is the real risk — AI speeds tasks, which raises expectations, which increases reliance, which expands scope, ultimately creating a cycle that drives burnout in a profession already plagued by it.
• Purposeful integration is the antidote — Legal organizations need to promote intentional governance structures that account for how people actually behave with AI, not how leadership imagines they will or should.

If you’ve attended a legal technology conference anytime over the past two years, you’ve heard the pitch: Automate the mundane and elevate the meaningful. A study published [subscription needed] in the Harvard Business Review by UC-Berkeley researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye suggests we should be more skeptical. They tracked how generative AI (GenAI) changed work habits over eight months at a 200-person technology company. Their findings were striking — AI tools didn’t reduce work; rather, they intensified it. According to the study, the tech employees studied were shown to work faster, take on broader responsibilities, extend their hours into evenings and weekends, and multitask more aggressively — all without being asked to do so. The promise of liberation became a reality of acceleration and overwork. For those of us in the legal profession, this should be a wake-up call…”