ABA Law Technology Today Publishes First Article in Professional Infrastructure Series
ABA Law Technology Today has published the first article in a four-part series from TheFormTool on legal technology, professional responsibility, and control.
The article, “Expanding Fault Lines in Legal Technology,” examines a growing tension in legal technology: the profession’s increasing dependence on systems optimized for convenience, scale, and automation, even when those systems may be difficult for lawyers and firms to fully understand, supervise, or control.
The series is not an argument against artificial intelligence, cloud systems, or legal technology modernization. The profession has always evolved with technology, and it should continue to do so.
The question is different:
Are lawyers still meaningfully directing the systems on which they rely, or are they increasingly becoming passengers inside them?
From the article:
“The issue is not whether technology should assist professionals; it’s whether professionals remain capable of meaningfully controlling the systems on which they increasingly rely. That distinction may become one of the defining professional questions of the next decade.”
The first article traces the evolution from heavy enterprise automation systems to cloud-based convenience platforms and now to AI-driven systems that increasingly participate in drafting, summarizing, recommending, and analyzing professional work.
It introduces a distinction between convenience infrastructure and professional infrastructure. Convenience infrastructure is optimized for speed, accessibility, integration, and scale. Professional infrastructure is optimized for accountability, inspectability, reproducibility, manageability, and control.
That distinction matters because not every legal task can tolerate the same level of uncertainty. Marketing copy, scheduling, and general research assistance may tolerate substantial automation variability. Privileged client drafting, court filings, and formal legal analysis may require much more direct professional oversight.
This article was originally published by the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Division’s blog, Law Technology Today.
Read the full article at ABA Law Technology Today: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/resources/law-technology-today/2026/expanding-fault-lines-in-legal-technology/
