Don’t Automate Yesterday: What Richard Susskind Keeps Trying to Tell Lawyers

If you read only one thinker on AI and the law, read Richard Susskind. He has been forecasting the transformation of legal services since before most of us had email, and the arrival of generative AI has made his central argument urgent rather than theoretical. In our firm’s six-month review of AI thought leadership, no one appeared more often, and no single idea of his appeared more often than this one: stop automating yesterday.

This is the second piece in our series engaging the leading voices in legal innovation. The first, on AI and the billable hour, looked at Jordan Furlong’s economic argument. Susskind’s argument is structural, and in some ways it is more radical.

The Core Idea: Redesign, Not Automation

Across his recent work, including a wide-ranging conversation on the American Arbitration Association’s AAAi podcast and an Axiom Insights interview, Susskind draws a sharp line between two responses to AI. The first is automation: taking your existing processes and making them faster with technology. The second is redesign: asking what outcome the client actually needs and rebuilding the system that delivers it, with AI assumed from the start.

Most of what the legal industry calls innovation, he argues, is the first thing wearing the costume of the second. Firms layer AI onto legacy workflows, celebrate the productivity gains, and leave the underlying system untouched. The result is a slightly faster version of yesterday.

His most memorable illustration involves clients. People do not want lawyers or lawsuits, he points out. They want outcomes: the dispute resolved, the deal closed, the risk avoided. In his recent thinking on dispute resolution, the interesting question is not whether AI can help judges but whether AI enables entirely new alternatives to courts, including systems that prevent disputes from arising at all.

The Uncomfortable Question for Law Firms

Susskind’s framework puts a hard question to every managing partner: if you were designing your firm today, from a blank sheet of paper, with current technology, would it look anything like what you run now? For most firms the honest answer is no. The partnership structure, the office footprint, the leverage model, the committee governance: all of it was designed for a world where legal knowledge was scarce, coordination was expensive, and the only way to scale was to stack associates.

He also flags, in his discussion of the future of work and lawtech, that legal education compounds the problem. We train lawyers in doctrine and advocacy, then wonder why the profession struggles with systems thinking, data, and design. Tomorrow’s lawyers, he argues, need fluency in how legal solutions are engineered, not just how legal arguments are made.

What Redesign Looked Like for Us

I want to be careful here, because Susskind is describing a transformation bigger than any single firm, and I do not claim we have implemented his full vision. But I can say that the question he poses, what would you build from a blank sheet, is the question we actually asked in 2003, and asked again when we rebranded and restructured as AEGIS Law in 2010.

Our answer was to redesign one specific system: the relationship between practicing law and running a law business. In the traditional model, those two jobs are fused in the same people, and the fusion serves neither. We separated them completely. Attorneys practice. A professional management team handles operations, billing, technology, and administration. Compensation is a transparent formula rather than a political process.

That single design decision turns out to be what makes AI adoption straightforward for us. Because no attorney’s livelihood depends on defending an old workflow, and because management can implement firm-wide tools without negotiating with a partnership, we can treat AI the way Susskind recommends: as a reason to rethink how work gets delivered, not as a bolt-on to how it always has been.

Prevention as the Next Frontier

One more Susskind theme deserves attention, because almost nobody in private practice talks about it. He argues that the highest use of AI in law may be preventative: data-driven systems that identify legal risk before it ripens into a dispute, the way modern medicine increasingly treats risk factors rather than heart attacks.

For business clients, this is where the next decade gets interesting. Imagine your counsel monitoring your contracts, your regulatory exposure, and your corporate housekeeping continuously, flagging problems while they are still cheap. That service does not fit an hourly model, which is one more reason the pricing revolution and the redesign revolution arrive together. Firms structured to sell time will struggle to sell prevention. Firms structured around client outcomes will find it natural.

The Bottom Line

Susskind’s message can sound abstract until you translate it into a single sentence:

the firms that win will be the ones willing to rebuild, not retrofit. Rebuilding is easier when your structure was built to be rebuilt.

That was the founding premise of our firm, and reading six months of Susskind’s work has convinced me it is the premise that matters most for the decade ahead.

By Scott Levine, Founder and Managing Partner, AEGIS Law