The Future of Law: Returning Wisdom to a World Full of Information
Author: Priscilla Schoendorf, Esq.
The Schoendorf Law Journal | Volume I: Law in Transition | Essay 001 | August 17, 2026
There was a time when one of the principal obstacles to understanding the law was simply finding it. Legal information was concentrated in books, libraries, institutions, and professionals who knew where to look. Access itself carried value because the path to an answer often began with knowing how to locate the right source.
That world is changing quickly. Statutes, cases, regulations, commentary, and explanatory materials are increasingly available to anyone with an internet connection. Artificial intelligence can now help organize that information, compare authorities, summarize competing positions, and identify questions that once required substantial time simply to uncover.
This is an important development, and much of it should be welcomed. Greater access to legal information can reduce unnecessary barriers between people and the institutions that affect their lives. Technology can help lawyers work more efficiently, allow businesses to identify issues earlier, and give individuals a better starting point for understanding legal problems before they decide what to do next.
But easier access to information raises a more interesting question for the legal profession. If information itself becomes increasingly abundant, what becomes more valuable about the lawyer?
The answer may be judgment.
When the Answer Is Only the Beginning
The traditional value of professional expertise has never rested entirely on possession of information. The difficult part of legal work is often determining which information matters, how competing rules interact, what facts change the analysis, how much uncertainty remains, and what should be done once those things are understood.
Legal problems rarely arrive in the orderly form in which statutes and judicial opinions describe them. They arrive as stories. A client explains what happened, what was said, what was expected, what changed, and what the client believes another person did wrong. Important facts may be missing because nobody realized they would matter. Documents may tell a different story from memory. A seemingly decisive legal rule may become less decisive once jurisdiction, timing, procedure, or an exception enters the analysis.
In that environment, locating the law is only one part of the work. The lawyer must determine what question is actually being asked.
People usually seek counsel because they are uncertain about what should happen next. Knowing that a legal right or remedy may exist is often only the beginning. The more difficult question is how that law applies to the circumstances in front of them and whether pursuing a particular course will actually serve their broader interests. A business owner considering litigation, for example, may be less concerned with whether a claim can be pleaded than with whether litigation is the right path for the company, what it may demand in time and resources, and whether the available evidence supports the story the business believes to be true. In that sense, counsel is not simply about identifying what the law permits. It is about helping someone understand the consequences of the choices the law makes available.
Greater access to information does not make that process unnecessary. In some respects, it makes it more important. When people can obtain answers quickly, the professional challenge shifts from finding an answer to determining whether the answer belongs to the problem in front of them.
That distinction matters because information can create confidence before it creates understanding. A statute can be read without knowing how courts have interpreted it. A judicial opinion can be summarized without understanding which facts drove the result. An artificial intelligence system can produce a coherent explanation without accepting responsibility for what happens if the explanation is incomplete, outdated, or applied to facts that are materially different.
The goal should not be to make legal information harder to access. The goal should be to become better at recognizing the difference between access and judgment.
Technology and the Temptation of Speed
Artificial intelligence presents the legal profession with two easy extremes. One is to resist it because professional work has historically been performed differently. The other is to assume that because a machine can perform part of a legal task, the professional value associated with that task has disappeared.
Neither approach is particularly useful.
Technology should be evaluated by what it allows professionals to do better. If a system can organize a large collection of documents more quickly, identify competing authorities, compare versions of an agreement, or help a lawyer see a pattern that deserves further examination, there is little value in preserving inefficiency simply because it is familiar.
The more meaningful question is what happens after the technology has done that work.
Technology has the potential to return more professional time to that function. If artificial intelligence can responsibly reduce the time spent on routine organization, preliminary review, drafting, and information retrieval, its greatest value may not be speed for its own sake. The more meaningful benefit is that it can create additional room for the lawyer to focus on the work that requires judgment, to test assumptions, identify what may have been overlooked, and consider whether the process being followed is actually serving the client’s broader interests.
That possibility should be welcomed by the legal profession, but not without discipline. Greater efficiency can make legal services more accessible and reduce the time and expense associated with work that does not require sustained professional judgment. At the same time, speed should not become a substitute for careful analysis.
Some legal questions require time because the difficulty lies not in locating an answer, but in testing whether the answer holds. A complicated matter may warrant more than one theory before a sound position emerges. An argument that initially appears persuasive may weaken once the record is examined more closely, and a client’s preferred conclusion may need to be tested against facts or authority that point in another direction.
Technology should make that work easier to reach, not easier to avoid. Its value is greatest when it creates more space for the lawyer to examine the difficult parts of a problem with greater care, rather than simply moving through them more quickly. That is where professional judgment continues to carry its greatest value.
Returning to Counsel
The word counsel describes something broader than the delivery of information. Counsel requires understanding the problem well enough to help another person decide what to do about it.
That function can become obscured when professional value is measured primarily by the volume of work performed. Legal practice developed within systems that often rewarded time, process, and the production of documents because those activities were necessary to locate, organize, and communicate information. As technology reduces some of that burden, the profession has an opportunity to reconsider where human attention is most useful.
A lawyer can spend less time recreating information that already exists and more time asking whether an apparent answer survives closer examination. The lawyer can devote more attention to the client's objective, the practical consequences of available choices, the strength of competing narratives, and the possibility that the most legally aggressive path is not the most useful one.
This does not reduce the importance of legal knowledge. Judgment without knowledge is intuition. The profession still depends upon lawyers who understand doctrine, procedure, institutions, and the limits of their own expertise. What changes is the relationship between knowledge and value. When information is harder to obtain, access itself carries greater weight. When information becomes abundant, the ability to interpret, challenge, and responsibly apply it becomes more visible.
That is also why human responsibility cannot be treated as an inconvenience that technology will eventually remove. Someone must decide which sources are reliable, whether an authority actually supports the proposition for which it is cited, whether an argument is fair to the facts, whether uncertainty has been communicated appropriately, and whether a client should act on the analysis. Those decisions belong to the professional who is accountable for the advice.
An Institution Built Around the Question
The Schoendorf Institute begins with this tension between abundant information and scarce judgment.
The Institute will examine changes in law, business, technology, institutions, and professional practice without assuming that every new development is transformative or that every longstanding practice deserves to remain unchanged. Some innovations will improve access and reduce unnecessary friction. Others will create new legal questions, new forms of risk, or new reasons to value human interpretation. Many will do both.
Artificial intelligence will be part of that work. We intend to use it, question it, test it, and write openly about the responsibilities that accompany its use. Technology can assist in collecting information, organizing research, comparing ideas, challenging assumptions, and developing drafts. It can help surface questions that deserve closer attention. But the decision about what should be published, what a source actually establishes, what conclusion is justified, and what professional position should be taken remains a human responsibility.
That division of labor is not a temporary compromise while technology improves. It reflects a more fundamental idea about professional work. Tools can become more capable without making responsibility less important.
The easiest prediction about the future of law is that technology will become more deeply integrated into legal work. The more meaningful question is what the profession chooses to do with that capability.
If technology allows lawyers to spend less time searching and more time understanding, that is progress. If it allows legal information to become more accessible while preserving careful analysis, that is progress. If it gives professionals greater capacity to question assumptions, explain uncertainty, and help clients make better decisions, that is progress.
But those outcomes will not occur simply because the technology exists. They depend upon how it is used.
The future of law should not be measured only by how quickly an answer can be produced. It should also be measured by whether the people receiving those answers are better able to understand the choices in front of them.
That is the future this Institute intends to study. It is also the future we intend to help build.
Questions Worth Considering
If information becomes increasingly inexpensive and accessible, which forms of professional judgment become more valuable?
How should lawyers use technology to reduce unnecessary process while preserving responsibility and trust?
As artificial intelligence changes the tasks lawyers perform, should the profession reconsider how the value of counsel is defined?
Author
Priscilla Schoendorf, Esq. is the founder and Editor in Chief of The Schoendorf Institute and the founder of Schoendorf Law. She writes about litigation, business, employment, land use, artificial intelligence, professional responsibility, and the changing delivery of legal services.
Publication Notice
This publication is provided for educational and informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship. The law may vary by jurisdiction and depends upon the facts and circumstances of each matter.