Junior associates powered the engines of Biglaw. Like the human batteries of the Matrix except instead of the deluded bliss of the late 20th century, they survive on the deluded bliss of ever having the time to spend their bonus on something fun. They slogged through document review, churned out first drafts, and otherwise served at the beck and call of their senior colleagues while drowning under the crushing weight of student loans.
While artificial intelligence generates a lot of hype as a threat to junior associates, AI still requires a junior user. Firms may not need as many juniors in the world of AI, but some of those jobs will survive the AI onslaught. Alternative legal services providers (ALSPs), on the other hand, could join forces with AI and decimate the junior ranks.
The word “decimate” is often misused, but in this case we mean it literally… AI will one day send centurions to publicly execute every tenth associate to enforce the discipline of Rome. All right, maybe not literally and realistically it’s going to be more a lot more than 10 percent.
ALSPs are increasingly taking on the grunt work that used to be the proving ground for new attorneys. According to the Alternative Legal Services Providers 2025 Report — produced by the Thomson Reuters Institute, the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law; and the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford — 35 percent of law firms already use independent ALSPs to deliver services to clients, with usage expected to increase in the next year. Among firms with their own affiliate ALSPs, a remarkable 62% also engage independent ALSPs to handle tasks like eDiscovery, contract review, and compliance work.
The report estimates the ALSP market reached $28.5 billion in 2023, growing at an 18 percent compound annual rate, outpacing traditional legal services. While ALSPs have always offered corporate law departments a cost-effective solution for high-volume work, those clients have increasingly overcome their hangups as junior associate rates climb. Beyond the these tasks, ALSPs are also penetrating niche areas like regulatory compliance and tech-enabled legal operations, markets that law firms tend to neglect.
For junior associates, this trend strips away some of the foundational work historically relied upon to develop professional skills. This outsourcing is great for clients looking to save money and increase efficiency, but it deprives new lawyers of the opportunity to develop expertise in these areas. And while few tears are shed over combing through irrelevant emails, there’s something to be said for learning why something is irrelevant.
And let’s not forget the joy of piecing together an office affair from the email dump—one of the last perks of document review.
Junior associates also used to create legal content from scratch before an avalanche of red ink created an unrecognizable final draft. But with AI and ALSPs delivering polished drafts, juniors spend more time editing than analyzing. That’s all well and good until you remember that they don’t actually know what makes a good draft in the first place. And it will only get worse as the report found that 40% of firms anticipate increasing their use of independent ALSPs specifically because it is “more profitable to outsource” such work.
It’s not that ALSPs actually outperform junior associates. In fact, the report highlights lingering concerns about ALSP quality and confidentiality, with half of corporate respondents citing these as barriers to full adoption. Yet the price gap between ALSPs and law firm associates has made the decision an easy one for many corporate law departments.
Clients may see ALSPs as a value play rather than a skill play, there’s something to be said for the fact that ALSPs are staffed with folks with experience — the experience that the juniors used to get on the job. For tasks like document review and due diligence, where the stakes are low but the volume is high, ALSPs offer efficiency that most law firms simply cannot match. Volume work is their bread and butter.
Which is where the AI comes in. While generative AI remains in its infancy within the legal sector, 45 percent of law firms are at least exploring the development of GenAI-powered services… but ALSPs already lead the way in adoption.
The report paints a sobering picture for the future of legal apprenticeship. If firms and ALSPs continue down their current paths, junior associates may find themselves doing less legal analysis and more project management, overseeing the work of ALSPs and AI tools. While this might make for more efficient firms, it risks creating a generation of lawyers as middle managers lack hands-on legal skills needed to progress to more traditionally senior tasks.
This shift also has implications for client service. Corporate clients may appreciate the immediate cost savings ALSPs and GenAI deliver, but will they still value these savings if they come at the cost of eroding the next generation of legal talent? Clients have long complained about paying for the training pipeline, but as the report notes, clients already cite quality as a significant concern when dealing with ALSPs and “decrease the quality across the board” is a less than efficient solution.
Or maybe the future of law is bland middle management. When Elon makes Trump turn over the judiciary to the robots, maybe we won’t need lawyers to think creatively or persuasively. Just ones who can click “approve” on a machine’s work.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post The Emperor’s New Associates: ALSPs Replacing Junior Lawyers appeared first on Above the Law.
Junior associates powered the engines of Biglaw. Like the human batteries of the Matrix except instead of the deluded bliss of the late 20th century, they survive on the deluded bliss of ever having the time to spend their bonus on something fun. They slogged through document review, churned out first drafts, and otherwise served at the beck and call of their senior colleagues while drowning under the crushing weight of student loans.
While artificial intelligence generates a lot of hype as a threat to junior associates, AI still requires a junior user. Firms may not need as many juniors in the world of AI, but some of those jobs will survive the AI onslaught. Alternative legal services providers (ALSPs), on the other hand, could join forces with AI and decimate the junior ranks.
The word “decimate” is often misused, but in this case we mean it literally… AI will one day send centurions to publicly execute every tenth associate to enforce the discipline of Rome. All right, maybe not literally and realistically it’s going to be more a lot more than 10 percent.
ALSPs are increasingly taking on the grunt work that used to be the proving ground for new attorneys. According to the Alternative Legal Services Providers 2025 Report — produced by the Thomson Reuters Institute, the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law; and the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford — 35 percent of law firms already use independent ALSPs to deliver services to clients, with usage expected to increase in the next year. Among firms with their own affiliate ALSPs, a remarkable 62% also engage independent ALSPs to handle tasks like eDiscovery, contract review, and compliance work.
The report estimates the ALSP market reached $28.5 billion in 2023, growing at an 18 percent compound annual rate, outpacing traditional legal services. While ALSPs have always offered corporate law departments a cost-effective solution for high-volume work, those clients have increasingly overcome their hangups as junior associate rates climb. Beyond the these tasks, ALSPs are also penetrating niche areas like regulatory compliance and tech-enabled legal operations, markets that law firms tend to neglect.
For junior associates, this trend strips away some of the foundational work historically relied upon to develop professional skills. This outsourcing is great for clients looking to save money and increase efficiency, but it deprives new lawyers of the opportunity to develop expertise in these areas. And while few tears are shed over combing through irrelevant emails, there’s something to be said for learning why something is irrelevant.
And let’s not forget the joy of piecing together an office affair from the email dump—one of the last perks of document review.
Junior associates also used to create legal content from scratch before an avalanche of red ink created an unrecognizable final draft. But with AI and ALSPs delivering polished drafts, juniors spend more time editing than analyzing. That’s all well and good until you remember that they don’t actually know what makes a good draft in the first place. And it will only get worse as the report found that 40% of firms anticipate increasing their use of independent ALSPs specifically because it is “more profitable to outsource” such work.
It’s not that ALSPs actually outperform junior associates. In fact, the report highlights lingering concerns about ALSP quality and confidentiality, with half of corporate respondents citing these as barriers to full adoption. Yet the price gap between ALSPs and law firm associates has made the decision an easy one for many corporate law departments.
Clients may see ALSPs as a value play rather than a skill play, there’s something to be said for the fact that ALSPs are staffed with folks with experience — the experience that the juniors used to get on the job. For tasks like document review and due diligence, where the stakes are low but the volume is high, ALSPs offer efficiency that most law firms simply cannot match. Volume work is their bread and butter.
Which is where the AI comes in. While generative AI remains in its infancy within the legal sector, 45 percent of law firms are at least exploring the development of GenAI-powered services… but ALSPs already lead the way in adoption.
The report paints a sobering picture for the future of legal apprenticeship. If firms and ALSPs continue down their current paths, junior associates may find themselves doing less legal analysis and more project management, overseeing the work of ALSPs and AI tools. While this might make for more efficient firms, it risks creating a generation of lawyers as middle managers lack hands-on legal skills needed to progress to more traditionally senior tasks.
This shift also has implications for client service. Corporate clients may appreciate the immediate cost savings ALSPs and GenAI deliver, but will they still value these savings if they come at the cost of eroding the next generation of legal talent? Clients have long complained about paying for the training pipeline, but as the report notes, clients already cite quality as a significant concern when dealing with ALSPs and “decrease the quality across the board” is a less than efficient solution.
Or maybe the future of law is bland middle management. When Elon makes Trump turn over the judiciary to the robots, maybe we won’t need lawyers to think creatively or persuasively. Just ones who can click “approve” on a machine’s work.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
