The legal profession in its modern iteration has never been about gatekeeping legal knowledge. All the knowledge is there in practitioner texts, textbooks, journals and even online articles (to varying degrees of accuracy). Coffesshop uncles have access to these info at their fingertips.

Rather, lawyering is all about monetizing the blood, sweat and labour of hundreds of bodies called young lawyers and fresh grads (doing the most mundane tasks like due diligence, sifting through data rooms or piecing veritable mountains of boring as fk documentary evidence into a coherent case theory) and turning such labour into a product for clients, in exchange for that sweet sweet monetizable billable hours.

And doing it on an industrial scale so as to be profitable, I might add.

People who claim that AI or chatGPT will replace lawyering reveal how little they actually understand what the legal profession is. All it will do is to help lawyers monetize their product better.