Why we’re talking tasks, not jobs
Linar Consulting’s Sam Stamp is behind a new initiative designed to address the convergence of the different experiences he and his colleagues have across sales, technology, operations, and innovation. The result is Legal Engine – a team of voice-based AI assistants that can swiftly capture what lawyers know and turn it into powerful, multi-use content.
The problem with jobs is they’re too complicated. They include all the messy stuff: expectations, office politics, overlapping responsibilities, emotional baggage. That’s part of what makes them human. But it also makes them hard to redesign or to improve with technology. Tasks, on the other hand, are simple. You either did it, or you didn’t.
After experimenting with various AI solutions, focusing in particular on knowledge work and speaking to an awful lot of law firms, we landed on four key insights.
It’s in these that, we believe, the biggest transformation in professional services is going to come from and, of course more importantly, we think it will be a whole lot better for everyone if there isn’t large-scale job displacement on the horizon.
I can summarise as follows:
- A lot of the most valuable information in firms simply isn’t written down.
- Time is money in the legal world. And voice interaction is three times quicker than typing into an email, Word document, Excel spreadsheet or database assuming, of course, all of these required tasks get addressed in the first place.
- Extracting that information properly requires a level of expertise; it’s much more than simply transcribing and it means scaling is a challenge.
- And, once it’s captured, it should be reusable and easily accessible across multiple tasks and platforms. You shouldn’t have to ask for it twice.
“If something is worth doing once, it’s probably worth doing a hundred times. The only reason it isn’t is because nobody has the time. This is where AI makes a real difference. Not by replacing people, but by doing the repetitive stuff for which they never had enough hours.”
Here’s why tasks (or ‘chores’ as our CTO likes to call them) are the best place to start:
1. Tasks are knowable
You can break them down. You can define what “done” looks like. And, yes, you can teach a machine to do them well whether that’s updating credentials, capturing a matter summary or drafting follow-ups. These aren’t complex, multi-faceted “roles”, but they are essential, and they come with a value attached.
2. Tasks are scalable
One BD executive might update a CRM weekly, but an AI agent can do it 100 times a day – and for every lawyer in the firm without breaking sweat. That’s the idea behind “abundant capacity”. If something is worth doing once, it’s probably worth doing a hundred times. The only reason it isn’t is because nobody has the time.
This is where AI makes a real difference. Not by replacing people, but by doing the repetitive stuff for which they never had enough hours. But, and here’s the point, it requires a fundamental rethink of the resources you have at your disposal.
3. Tasks take up valuable time
One of the strange things about law firms is how often you see great people doing the worst jobs. Not because they love them, but because everyone knows they’ll do them right. In fact, they often take up a lot of the time on a role when they should be focused on more strategic or holistic thinking. That’s a waste of talent – and it takes us back to where I started.
AI lets us flip that. By clearly defining what success looks like for a task – and building agents to reliably deliver it – we can free up those same people to spend more time where their judgement, creativity, and relationships matter.
So what happens when you remove the bottleneck?
That is, or should be, the real question. If your team suddenly had infinite capacity for the BD and marketing tasks that slow everything down, what would you do with it? How would you use that time? On what growth opportunities could you finally act?
That’s the promise of agentic AI. In launching Legal Engine, we didn’t want to build software; we wanted to build “assistants” capable of taking on the tasks that keep your firm running. And nor, crucially, do we see any of this as replacing people. Instead, it’s about removing the obstacles and friction that prevents your best people from doing their best work.
Does this sound idealistic? Well, it explicitly is. And the glorious reality is that we literally have the ability to make decisions that could result in the promise of these positive and transforming outcomes a reality.