A few months ago I was invited to a round table on AI and the legal profession. At one point, one of the speakers, with unmistakable enthusiasm, said that artificial intelligence will finally free us from a great deal of “monkey lawyering.” Although the discussion was taking place in Milan and was entirely in Italian, he deliberately chose the English expression. It was the right choice. Few phrases capture the idea so precisely, and the audience immediately reacted to it.
By monkey lawyering he meant all those repetitive, mechanical tasks that absorb time without truly requiring judgment. Copying, pasting, renaming, reformatting, filing, sending the same communication again and again with minor adjustments. Work that demands attention and discipline, but not strategy. Work that can now be automated.
There is little doubt that AI will eliminate much of it. In fact, it already does. And yet, I still use AI more to enhance than to automate. If I look at my own work or at Better Ipsum’s activities, I could automate far more than I currently do. I could build systems that send one hundred nearly identical emails with small variations. I could scale communication aggressively. From a marketing perspective, that might even be considered efficient.
But when I look at my agenda, I still prefer sending invitations one by one. I still choose to sign and mail copies of my books myself. I still write the final version of anything that carries my name. I am not interested in building a machine that produces at scale and then adds a thin human layer on top. I am not interested in multiplying output for its own sake. I am interested in thinking better.
We tend to confuse leverage with value. Automation undoubtedly creates leverage. What it does not automatically create is meaning.
This brings me back to my early years.
When I began practicing law, much of my time was devoted to what would now be labelled monkey work: filing and serving documents at the court clerk’s office, working evenings and nights translating documents, or preparing countless copies of injunction decrees with little more to change than the names of the parties and the amounts involved. In the UK or US, much of this would have been delegated to paralegals or outsourced. In Italy, at the time, it was simply part of the formation.
It was repetitive and exhausting, yet deeply formative. That was where discipline took shape, where structure became second nature, and where precision stopped being a principle and became a reflex. There is a broader implication here that goes well beyond efficiency. If AI removes the repetitive “monkey” layer entirely, mentorship cannot remain unchanged. Investing in juniors becomes harder to justify, and an entire phase of professional maturation risks being compressed or quietly skipped altogether.
There is no point in romanticizing the past. Few people genuinely miss spending entire afternoons adjusting names on identical documents. Yet it would be naive to ignore that those tasks were also a training ground. That so-called monkey work shaped my professional identity. It trained my standards, my patience, my attention to detail. Part of what I have built over the past years rests precisely on that unglamorous foundation.
Monkey lawyering will disappear. That is almost certain. The real question is what we decide to do with the time and attention that are freed.
We can use that time to produce more, to accelerate, to fill every available space with low-level, noisy output. Or we can use it to think better, to refine judgment, to deepen what we are actually building.
The first path is the one I see most often. Because it is efficient, visible, measurable, while the other one quieter, slower, and scales less. That said, the second path is the only one that builds substance, reputation, and trust, things that cannot be copied, pasted, or automated away.
In the end, that is the real choice AI is placing in front of us.
