There’s a fascinating article making the rounds about the pivot to a more product-professional focus for developers — but I’ve watched this movie before, in a different theater.
Personal injury attorneys were about as technology-averse as professionals get. The work ran on volume and grind: pulling medical records, drafting demand letters, valuing claims off precedent. Ask some lawyers to change a workflow and you’d get a speech about how settlement value is a feel you develop over years, how no software knows what a torn rotator cuff is worth to a jury. Then AI started chewing through the record review and first-draft demands in a fraction of the time, and the dam broke fast — the holdouts didn’t win, they just got a head start on being left behind.
Here’s why that matters to you: the job was never the grunt work. For the PI lawyer, the job was always the judgment — reading the adjuster, knowing which cases to push to trial and which to settle. The records summary was just the slow part that felt important because it hurt. Now that a machine does the producing in seconds, you can see the work for what it always was: deciding what’s worth doing and what can be automated, safely and responsibly. When generation costs nothing, the bottleneck isn’t writing the code — it’s knowing what “correct” looks like and spelling it out so an agent can nail it.
The value isn’t implementing the goal. It’s defining it.
The good PI lawyers already spend their time on the analysis and the negotiation — the parts worth paying for — and let the machine do the gathering. This doesn’t mean trusting the machine blindly. Treat AI output the way a senior attorney treats a first-year’s brief: nothing goes out the door without a human putting their name on it and meaning it.
The article isn’t really about engineering or law. It’s the choice AI is shoving in front of everybody: pivot to leveraging your creativity and judgment, not archaic workflows. It’s been said, “grow or die.” But for me, I see it much more as “pivot and innovate or die.” My two cents.