The rise of the Superlawyer

Every good lawyer I have ever worked with falls, broadly, into one of four types.

There is the people person: warm, empathetic, brilliant with clients, the solicitor who remembers every family member's name and makes nervous clients feel at ease, but who is not always on top of the latest case law or the most recent Home Office policy update.

There is the technical lawyer: a walking encyclopaedia of statutes and precedents who can cite the relevant tribunal decision from memory, but whose client emails read like legislation and who forgets to pick up the phone and tell someone their application has been granted.

There is the rainmaker: commercially sharp, reads a room better than anyone, wins instructions because clients trust them and businesses believe they understand their world. The rainmaker is the one who picks up the phone and lands the deal. The problem is that they then have to do the work, and the work requires a level of sustained, detail-oriented casework that is fundamentally incompatible with the personality that won the client in the first place. They over-promise because they genuinely believe they can deliver, and then reality catches up.

And finally there is the strategist: the one who looks at the law like a game of chess, who sees the angle nobody else sees, the route through the Rules that avoids the obvious refusal ground, the argument that reframes the entire case. The problem with the strategist is that they look at the other lawyers, the clients, and the everyday procedural work as beneath them. They think in leaps, not steps, and what feels obvious to them is opaque to everyone else.

Every firm has some combination of these four. The traditional model tries to train each one into something they are not: send the people person on a legal update course; put the technical lawyer through a client care workshop; tell the rainmaker to manage their time better when the real problem is that they cannot be the person who wins the work and the person who does the work simultaneously; put the strategist in the corner office and pull them out when their talents are needed, because nobody has ever worked out how to make them function as part of a normal team. None of it sticks. The people person forgets the update within a month. The technical lawyer goes back to writing emails that read like skeleton arguments. The rainmaker hires an associate, becomes a manager they never wanted to be, and the casework suffers anyway. The strategist stays in the corner office, increasingly isolated, increasingly frustrated that nobody around them can keep up.

I have spent over twenty years watching this cycle repeat, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to recognise that the problem was never the lawyers. The problem was that we kept asking human beings to be something other than human. We built an entire professional culture around the idea that a good lawyer must be all four things at once: empathetic and technically brilliant and commercially astute and strategically sharp. The reality is that almost nobody is. The ones who come closest tend to burn out, because maintaining that kind of cognitive range is exhausting. The rest of us develop coping mechanisms: we delegate our weaknesses to others, or we simply ignore them and hope nobody notices. Sometimes nobody does. Sometimes a client falls through the cracks.

This is where AI changes everything, and I do not say that lightly. I am an immigration solicitor who also builds AI tools, and I am deeply suspicious of anyone who tells you that artificial intelligence is going to replace lawyers. It is not. That narrative is pushed by technology companies who want to sell you a platform, and by consultants who have never sat across a desk from an innovator founder who has just found out that their chosen endorsing body has refused to endorse their application. AI does not understand fear. It does not understand what it means to have your entire life in this country balanced on a decision made by someone you will never meet. It does not understand the particular cruelty of a system that demands perfection from people who have the least power to achieve it.

What AI does understand is pattern; structure; logic; recall. It can hold the entirety of the Immigration Rules in its memory without fatigue. It can cross-reference a statement of changes against existing case law in seconds. It can draft a letter that is technically accurate and emotionally literate, if you know how to ask it properly. It can remind you that you have not updated a client in three weeks. It can check whether a sponsor licence application has addressed every mandatory criterion before you submit it. It can do all of the things that human beings are bad at, not because we lack the intelligence, but because our attention is finite and our energy is not evenly distributed across every task.

AI does not replace lawyers. It completes them.

The people person leans on AI for up-to-date law, drafting, and compliance checks, so they can focus on what they do brilliantly: making clients feel heard, understood, and supported through the most stressful moments of their lives. The technical lawyer leans on AI to help communicate: drafting client-friendly emails, sending timely updates, flagging when a case has gone quiet for too long. The rainmaker leans on AI to actually deliver what their mouth committed to: the casework gets done, the deadlines get met, the promises made over lunch are kept, and they never have to become a manager to make it happen. The strategist leans on AI as the sparring partner they have never had: a mind that can keep up, that can stress-test an argument, challenge an interpretation, and then do the unglamorous work of turning the brilliant insight into an actual application with forms filled in and evidence assembled. For the first time, the strategist does not need to come down from the mountain to get things done. In each case, AI does not replace the lawyer's personality; it augments their strengths and compensates for their weaknesses. The result, in every case, is a superlawyer.

I use that word deliberately. Not because I think lawyers should have capes and origin stories, although frankly some of the tribunal decisions I have read suggest a supervillain or two on the bench. I use it because the concept captures something important: a superlawyer is not a different person. They are the same person, amplified. Tony Stark does not stop being a flawed, difficult, brilliant human being when he puts on the suit. He is still all of those things. But he built the suit himself, to compensate for his own limitations, and it lets him do things he could not do before. That is what AI does for a lawyer who uses it properly. It does not change who you are. It lets you be more of who you already are, without the gaps that used to hold you back.

The implications for how we structure firms are profound. If your people person no longer needs a technical supervisor looking over their shoulder because their AI tools catch the errors and flag the updates, you do not need that layer of management. If your technical lawyer can produce client communications that are warm and clear without a partner rewriting every email, you do not need the partner doing that rewriting. If your rainmaker can bring in work and see it through without hiring a team to clean up afterwards, the entire economic model of the firm shifts. If your strategist can operate at full capacity without a team of associates to translate their vision into paperwork, you do not need the associates. You need fewer people doing more meaningful work; the drudgery evaporates; the hierarchy flattens.

And this is the part that makes the legal establishment uncomfortable, because hierarchy is the thing. Law firms are not structured the way they are because it is efficient. They are structured that way because it serves a particular set of interests: the interests of the people at the top, who built their careers within that structure and whose status depends on its continuation. The billable hour rewards inefficiency. The associate model rewards exploitation. The partnership track rewards endurance, not excellence. AI threatens all of that, not because it replaces anyone, but because it removes the need for the layers of supervision and review and delegation that justify the pyramid. If a sole practitioner with the right AI tools can produce work at the same quality as a City firm, what exactly are you paying the City firm for? The answer, of course, is the brand. And brands erode.

I am not naive about this. There are things AI cannot do and should not be trusted to do. It hallucinates. It goes off topic or starts writing in American English. It presents fiction with the confidence of fact, which, come to think of it, is also a fair description of certain barristers I have instructed. You cannot hand a case to an AI and walk away. You need to understand the law well enough to know when the AI is wrong, which means the lawyer remains essential. But the nature of what the lawyer does changes. You move from being the person who produces the work to the person who directs, reviews, and quality-controls the work. You become the editor, not the author. And if you have ever worked with a good editor, you know that the editor is the one who actually matters.

The firms that will thrive are not the ones that adopt AI as a cost-cutting measure, stripping out staff and pocketing the savings. They are the ones that use AI to let their lawyers be fully themselves: to lean into their natural strengths rather than papering over their weaknesses with training courses that nobody remembers and management structures that nobody enjoys. The people person becomes a better people person. The technical lawyer becomes a better technical lawyer. The rainmaker actually delivers. The strategist finally has someone to talk to. And the clients, who are after all the point of all of this, get a service that is faster, more accurate, more responsive, and more human than anything the old model could provide.

That last point is the one that surprises people. More human? With AI? Yes. Because when a lawyer is not drowning in admin, not anxious about a compliance point they might have missed, not trying to be something they are not, they have the mental space to actually be present with their client. To listen. To notice that the person sitting across from them is not just a case file but a human being whose entire future depends on getting this right. AI takes the noise away. What is left is the signal. And the signal, in law as in life, is always human.

I built my tools because I believe this. Not because some venture capitalist told me there was a market opportunity, although there is. Not because a technology company offered me a white-label solution, although several have tried. I built them because I am a practitioner, and I know what practitioners need, and I know that the best tools are built by the people who use them. The legal technology industry is full of products designed by people who have never practised law, sold to firms by salespeople who have never run a case, and implemented by consultants who have never sat in a tribunal. That is not how you build something that works. You build something that works by doing the work, hitting the wall, and then building the thing that gets you past it.

Every good lawyer I know is one of those four types, or some uneven blend of them all. None of them is complete on their own. None of them needs to be. The rise of the superlawyer is not about becoming someone new. It is about finally being allowed to be who you already are.

I know which superlawyer I am. Do you?