Litigation in Transition: The Changing Economics of Legal Advocacy
Author: Priscilla Schoendorf, Esq.
The Schoendorf Law Journal | Volume I: Law in Transition | Essay 003 | September 7, 2026
Litigation has always been shaped by the tools available to the people who practice it. The practice itself carries a significant financial burden in part because information has historically been expensive to collect, organize, review, and understand. Files once lived in dozens of banker boxes, while legal research required combing through physical libraries or, more recently, searching electronic databases. Discovery likewise demanded teams of associates, paralegals, vendors, and contract reviewers to work through documents one by one before the handling attorney could begin determining what the information meant for the case. These processes became part of the familiar infrastructure of litigation and, over time, part of its economic model. But when technology materially changes how the work is performed, the economics built around the old way of performing it cannot remain unchanged indefinitely.
The law has gone through these transitions in the past. A substantial law library once represented a meaningful professional advantage. Attorneys would pour through their law journals and collection of court opinions while preparing their briefs. The larger the library, the more comprehensive a firm’s grasp of the law could be. This all changed with the advent of the computer. Now a lawyer working from a relatively modest office can search authorities that once required shelves of reporters, digests, treatises, and staff who understood how to navigate them. The work changed as the tool advanced. Yet the lawyer did not become less important simply because a law library became passe. It just changed how their time was spent. Less time was devoted to combing through a universe of potentially relevant information while greater value attached to understanding which authority mattered, how it fit the facts, and what should be done with it.
Artificial intelligence will bring a similar transition to litigation, although on a much broader scale. Its significance is not simply that a program can summarize a document or generate a chronology more quickly than a person. The more consequential change is that technology is beginning to separate the cost of organizing information from the cost of exercising professional judgment. For a profession whose traditional litigation model has often tied price closely to hours of human labor, that separation will be difficult to ignore.
The Cost Structure We Inherited
Litigation is inherently demanding work. No responsible use of technology changes that. Counsel must understand the client, identify the legal issues, test the factual record, determine what evidence is reliable, make strategic choices, prepare witnesses, work with experts, evaluate risk, negotiate when appropriate, and ultimately stand behind the positions advanced in court. Experts and other specialists remain necessary precisely because important disputes often turn on questions that require specialized knowledge. Technology cannot inspect a failing structure, determine the most defensible engineering methodology, evaluate the credibility of a witness, or decide whether a particular legal strategy serves the client's broader interests. What technology can do is reduce the amount of expensive professional time a lawyer must spend obtaining information before they can apply their judgments.
Discovery illustrates the distinction. Modern cases frequently produce enormous quantities of material, much of which has little ultimate significance. While things like email, text messages, cloud storage, collaborative platforms, photographs, electronic records, drafts documents, and metadata have made preservation easier it has also complicated the review process. The traditional response to volume has been additional labor. Large collections are sent to outside review centers. Junior lawyers perform an initial review, another layer checks the work, and more senior lawyers eventually examine the subset of information that is believed to matter. There are cases in which layered review remains appropriate, particularly where privilege, confidentiality, complexity, or unusual risk demands it. Yet the assumption that every large collection necessarily requires several levels of manual human sorting is becoming harder to defend as the tools for organizing that information improve.
AI-assisted systems can already help reduce this workload. They can identify duplicate material, group related communications, surface patterns, organize documents around subjects or custodians, build preliminary chronologies, and direct attention toward material more likely to be significant. This does not mean the review system is automated. These systems are imperfect and require supervision. A machine can group two communications together because they use similar language without understanding that one was serious and the other sarcastic. It may elevate a document that is legally meaningless or overlook something whose significance is obvious only when a larger context is understood. These imperfections do not make the technology superfluous. It simply changes the role of the attorney reviewing its work. The lawyer's value increasingly lies in determining what the organized information means. That distinction should influence price of attorney services.
A discovery process that once required a large team because no other responsible method existed cannot automatically justify the same staffing structure after technology materially alters how the work is done. Nor should efficiency be understood as a demand for inferior representation. The objective is not to eliminate lawyers from litigation or to replace careful review with an algorithm. It is to stop confusing the amount of human labor a task requires with the quality of the legal work produced.
That said, leaner litigation should still be excellent litigation.
The same principle extends to experts. A highly qualified engineer, accountant, physician, etc. may be indispensable to understanding or proving a case. The value of that expert lies in their training, the methodology they use, interpretation of the data, and the ability to explain and defend a conclusion. If technology allows data to be organized more quickly, large records to be compared more efficiently, or routine calculations to be performed without consuming hours of professional time, this does not make the expert's judgment less valuable. The implementation of this technology makes it easier to see which portion of the fee reflects actual expertise and which portion reflects the cost of document review. That distinction is going to matter more to clients now than it has in the past.
From Efficiency to Accessibility
Technology's most consequential effect on litigation will not be the speed attorneys can find information, but if the efficient nature of AI will make meaningful legal representation more accessible
A justice system does not become more accessible merely because everyone is permitted to file a complaint. Access has an economic dimension. If the cost of obtaining a meaningful adjudication rises beyond the resources of ordinary people and smaller enterprises, legal rights begin to separate according to purchasing power. The strongest claim does not necessarily become the claim most capable of being heard. The party most capable of financing the process acquires leverage independent of the merits. At some point, the profession has to ask whether this outcome is merely an unfortunate biproduct of the complex litigation process or evidence that the process itself needs to change. Technology makes that question more difficult to ignore because the profession has increasingly capable tools for reducing the labor that has made litigation so expensive in the first place.
The reality of attorney fees is not just a consideration left for equity partners to mull over. Clients already appear to understand the connection between technological advancement and stagnant prices. Thomson Reuters reported in 2026 that 71 percent of in-house legal professionals expect outside professional firms to change their commercial models as AI use increases, while only 28 percent of law firms reported having changed their pricing structures in response.[1] The significance is not that hourly billing will disappear. It is that clients recognize when the underlying work has changed, they will increasingly question a business model built around the old way of performing it.
That expectation is reasonable. If technology reduces the time required to organize discovery, review documents, conduct research, or perform other work that historically demanded substantial human labor, staffing and pricing will inevitably come under greater scrutiny. As technology assumes more of the work once performed manually, it becomes increasingly difficult to defend the cost of those processes as an unavoidable feature of quality.
The legal profession's own ethical framework reinforces the distinction. The legal profession’s own ethical framework adds another dimension to that conversation. New Jersey RPC 1.5 requires that a lawyer’s fee be reasonable. In determining reasonableness, the Rule considers, among other factors, the time and labor required, the novelty and difficulty of the questions presented, the skill necessary to perform the work properly, the amount involved, and the results obtained.[2] Technology does not alter that obligation, nor does the Rule prescribe any particular pricing model. But technology does change the context in which the time and labor reasonably required to perform legal work may be understood. As the tools change, so too does the question of what work actually requires. That is where efficiency becomes something larger than a business advantage. It becomes a question of access.
If innovation allows lawyers to preserve the quality of their judgment while reducing the cost of the infrastructure surrounding that judgment, our profession has an opportunity to make meaningful advocacy available to people and businesses who might otherwise be priced out of it. Whether we use that opportunity will say something important about what we believe the profession is for.
The Responsibility to Serve
Once technology makes greater efficiency possible, a harder question follows: who receives the benefit?
Law is both a profession and a business. Lawyers, experts, and specialists should be compensated for work requiring education, experience, judgment, responsibility, and risk. Firms also need sufficient resources to invest in people, security, technology, and the infrastructure necessary to serve their clients well. But legal services are not an ordinary commodity. They concern rights, property, livelihood, businesses, and access to institutions capable of enforcing the law. That creates an obligation to think seriously about cost.
Let’s be clear. Cost consciousness does not mean cheap representation. It means recognizing that a client's resources are part of the legal strategy. A sound litigation plan should consider not only what can be done, but what the client can sustain, which expenditures are likely to change the outcome, and when additional work stops producing corresponding value. That judgment becomes especially important when economic conditions tighten. Businesses may be protecting cash, employees, and operations while simultaneously financing litigation. Individuals may possess legitimate claims but lack the resources to pursue every available procedural step. In both circumstances, the legal budget is part of the problem counsel has been retained to help solve. Technology will make clients increasingly unwilling to accept unnecessary cost as an unavoidable feature of serious representation.
That pressure is likely to accelerate because the informational advantage once concentrated within legal institutions is steadily moving outward. Legal information now rests, quite literally, in the palm of the consumer's hand. Statutes, cases, regulations, commentary, forms, and increasingly sophisticated AI-assisted explanations can be reached in seconds. That access does not make the consumer a lawyer, nor does it diminish the need for experienced counsel. As information becomes easier to obtain, however, the lawyer’s value will lie less in possessing it and more in exercising the judgment, strategy, and advocacy necessary to make sense of it.
That shift will also change the market. Clients who see firms using traditional discovery models will have more alternatives available to them. New firms will emerge with different staffing structures, lower infrastructure costs, more deliberate use of specialists, and technology integrated into the design of the practice. Established institutions that adapt will remain formidable. Those that do not may find themselves becoming less and less relevant as the future marches forward.
The result is unlikely to be the disappearance of traditional legal practice. I expect, instead, a gradual shift in where clients perceive value and how they evaluate the cost of legal services. Prestige, experience, and institutional knowledge will remain important, but clients may increasingly expect a clearer connection between cost and the value being delivered. In that environment, lawyers, experts, procedures, and expenditures will be viewed through a more practical lens: how each meaningfully advances the client’s interests. As clients gain greater visibility into information, technology, and available alternatives, longstanding practices may face greater scrutiny simply because clients will have more tools to ask whether the same result can be achieved differently.
Tradition will continue to matter, but I believe its strongest role will be as a foundation for judgment rather than a reason to resist change.
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.
[1] Thomson Reuters, Future of Professionals Report 2026: Actionable Insights for Law Firm Leaders (2026).
[2] N.J. Rules of Professional Conduct 1.5(a).