Becoming, Doing, Being: GenAI and the Promise of Professional Identity in Law

Abstract

The legal profession offers its members a special identity in exchange for prolonged education and regulatory oversight. This article explores how the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) challenges that promise – particularly for new entrants – and the profession’s meaning and value. A key contribution of the article is to bridge two bodies of scholarship: the literature on institutional change (professional versus/and other logics and modes) and the growing research on technology in the professions. By bringing these together and drawing on the existing empirical research, we analyse how GenAI interacts with the processes of ‘becoming’, ‘doing’ and ‘being’ a lawyer – encompassing socialisation, tasks, motivation and esteem. Rather than treating GenAI as a singular threat or solution, we conceptualise its impacts as dependent on its melding with and reshaping existing professional and other belief systems and in certain workplace contexts. We argue that GenAI will reshape the profession’s core promise – what it offers to its members, and by extension, to the state and wider society. In doing so, we raise critical questions: Will aspiring lawyers still be motivated to undertake extensive education and remain in the regulatory fold if the traditional professional payoff becomes more ambiguous? And is the profession capable of imagining new professional identities?