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Eulogy for a Knowledge Worker

2026-09-28 (ed. 2026-09-29)

Like a lot of lawyers, I come from a family of lawyers. My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all were lawyers, and in fact we all went to the same law school. My great-grandfather was born at the turn of the century, abandoned by his parents and taken in to work on a farm. He graduated law school in 1918 with an LL.B., which was the precursor to the modern J.D., and worked in the Ithaca area as a lawyer for the rest of his life. He died in 1987, aged 92.

It goes without saying that the world changed in incredible, unimaginable ways over the span of his life. But what’s interesting is that his day-to-day job likely changed very little. Clients come and go, but the actual practice of law for a small lawyer looked roughly the same at the end of his career as it did in the beginning. The same was true for his son (my grandfather), and to a lesser extent his son (my father). Things have changed, sure — I’m sitting almost fifty floors up in a glass and steel cocoon in the heart of Manhattan, interacting with other lawyers across the globe almost instantaneously — but until about a year ago I could sit at my desk, read a contract or a memo or a brief, and reasonably draw a line back through a hundred years of my predecessors doing the same thing.

That continuity is coming to an end. Maybe it’s not quite here yet, but if you have spent any amount of time working with AI on legal tasks you can sense the trajectory of capabilities. What lawyers are saying now is like what mathematicians were saying a year ago, and coders a year before that. “The models are good but they don’t have taste.” “The models are like capable interns but they aren’t a replacement for me.” Even if these are true now, I haven’t heard a convincing answer for why it will remain so indefinitely.

I want to want this. I’m not a lawyer because I chose the path of least resistance, or because I’m just “keeping it in the family.” I love the law, and the idea of improving the practice of it is deeply and intuitively appealing. But it turns out that, standing on the precipice, what is supposed to feel like the next collective step feels increasingly like a funeral.

I was a weird, lonely kid. I got pretty good at playing a “normal character,” but I always felt defective, or at least different. I still do. Through a combination of luck and work, I found a space where I could channel my energy in a productive direction, and be recognized and rewarded for doing so. I think a lot of others in white-collar professions feel this way too. But in a world where the marginal cost of intelligence approaches zero, it’s hard not to feel that my value does too.¹ What do I have in this world? For a while there I’d found my way in from the cold. It’s strange to feel it coming back.

I’m not suggesting that I should have a veto right on progress. But it’s a bittersweet moment for me, and many others, to realize that we were not needed to create the world we wanted to see. I choose to believe that we can get through this—I’m sure as hell not going anywhere—but it’s going to be a long, strange trip.