For a long time… criminal defense practice changed slowly.
New statutes, sentencing guidelines…
A new appellate ruling every once in a while that changed things.
But the mechanics of the job stayed stable.
You read discovery...
Talked to your client...
Evaluated the officer’s narrative.
You decided what actually happened versus what could be proven.
And your judgment… not your tools…
Determined the outcome.
Then digital evidence arrived:
Bodycams, dashcams...
Phone downloads.
At first it just meant more material.
More videos to watch and reports to read.
But eventually something shifted.
Cases stopped being about whether evidence existed…
And started being about how it was interpreted.
The job didn’t disappear...
It got heavier.
Something similar is happening again.
Not with evidence, but with analysis.
Right now across the profession…
Attorneys are interacting with AI in small ways.
Mostly behind the scenes.
Summaries, timelines, draft language.
Quick research checks late at night.
No big announcement or policy discussion.
Just small moments of convenience.
And that’s exactly why this is a critical moment.
Because every major change in legal practice begins this way.
Not with full adoption, but with informal use.
Years ago, email entered law firms like that.
No firm policy.
Just someone replying to a client from home.
Then it became discoverable and expected.
It became part of your firm infrastructure.
The same thing happened with texting clients.
Then cloud storage.
Then remote meetings.
At first: optional.
Later: unavoidable.
Eventually: regulated by reality, not ethics committees.
AI has now entered the profession at the same stage.
Informal interaction...
Small experiments...
No shared professional standard yet.
Which means the rules aren’t fully written.
They’re forming now.
And when professional rules form…
They don’t form around what is possible.
They form around what caused problems.
Around the case someone mishandled.
The filing someone trusted too much.
The confidentiality someone assumed.
Every practice area experiences this moment once...
Where behavior moves faster than norms.
And the attorneys who recognize it early don’t become pioneers…
They become safe.
This isn’t about replacing lawyers.
It’s about the profession deciding:
What counts as reasonable judgment now?
Because the standard of care never stays frozen in time.
It updates quietly, then suddenly.
You don’t need to master AI this year.
But you probably want to understand where the boundary is forming…
Before you find out indirectly.
Over the next few issues…
We’re going to walk through what’s actually changing in practice behavior…
Where attorneys are already drawing lines…
And what seems to hold up under scrutiny.
Observation instead of theory.
Next issue:
The three ways lawyers are already using AI...
And why only one of them is defensible long-term.
Reply and let us know:
Have you personally used AI for anything related to a case yet?
Just yes or no.
No explanation needed.
P.S. Criminal defense isn’t the only area trying to work this out.
We’ve been tracking how firms across multiple practice areas are interacting with AI…
And documenting it each week in The Legal Brief.
You can explore the archive here → www.thelegalbrief.co/archive