Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
Chicago-based multinational law firm Baker McKenzie Legal Center is laying off a thousand employees as part of its pivot to AI adoption. rollonfriday reports.
This may be a sign of the extent to which AI-related cuts may affect other industries, with it not being lawyers who are bearing the brunt, but their hundreds of support staff. According to reporting, these include “dozens of roles in London and Belfast” and hundreds of functions including information, research, marketing and secretarial.
A spokesperson said the cuts, which could affect up to ten percent of its global workforce or 600 to 1,000 people, were made after the company “carefully reviewed” the actions of its “business professionals”. ROFAI is clearly mentioned as a factor in the decision.
“The aim of this review was to rethink the way we work, including using AI, introducing efficiencies and investing in roles that best meet the needs of our customers,” the spokesperson said.
The law firm reported layoffs after Anthropic’s new cloud cowork AI agent triggered a panic selloff that sent the stock market tumbling last week. Investors feared that the cloud’s plugin to automate some legal tasks and paperwork could lead to layoffs and outcompete expensive software used by law firms and other white-collar organizations.
Perhaps the fate of Baker McKenzie’s support staff confirms all their worst fears. Or it could be a sign of something else that has been dominating the discussion in the tech and finance sectors lately: so-called “AI washing.”
More and more companies are justifying headcount cuts by resorting to dubious promises of technology a report It found that AI was cited in more than 54,000 layoff announcements last year. But critics say business leaders are using AI to justify cuts made for other financial reasons, and point to the fact that many companies do not have serious AI replacements to make up the shortfall.
“Companies are saying ‘We’re hoping we’re going to introduce AI that will take over these jobs.’ But this has not happened yet. So there’s reason to be skeptical,” said Wharton School professor Peter Cappelli. told new York Times.
Furthermore, a lot of research and real-world cases have shown that AI tools and agents cannot reliably do the job of a human being, or at least not yet. The introduction of the technology into legal settings has been particularly farcical, with several lawyers being punished by judges because the AI they used contained faulty citations and fabricated case law. Hallucinating AI has become such a thorn in the side of law firms that Took the desperate measure of employing its own AI To capture LLM usage.
Time will tell whether the layoffs, whether “AI-washed” or actually intended to replace human grunts, will come back to haunt them. At Baker McKenzie, an employee on the chopping block called his bosses’ decision “short-sighted”. ROFIn a babble filled with abuses.
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