The Lincoln Restoration: How AI is returning lawyers to their counselor roots

Abraham Lincoln never heard the phrase "billable hour." When he died in 1865, lawyers were still primarily counselors. Five years later, Harvard Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell began the transformation that would emphasize legal analysis over client counseling -- a model that artificial intelligence is now fundamentally challenging.

Today, as AI commoditizes the technical skills that law schools have emphasized for over 100 years, the profession is returning to something Lincoln embodied: the counselor's role.

The great inversion of 1870

Before Langdell's reforms, lawyers learned through apprenticeship. Most future attorneys spent years in established law offices, reading legal texts while handling routine contracts and client matters. This "reading law" approach produced counselors first, researchers second.

Lincoln exemplified this tradition. Self-taught, he advised a young aspiring lawyer in 1855: "If you are absolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself the thing is more than half done already." His effectiveness came not from superior legal resources -- he practiced in rural Illinois with a limited law library -- but from understanding what clients truly needed.

He was famous for discouraging unnecessary litigation. He found creative solutions that avoided court. Most importantly, he read the human elements that no legal text could teach.

Then came the transformation. When Langdell became Harvard's dean in 1870, he revolutionized legal education. Law students would no longer learn through client service but through case analysis. "Law is a science," Langdell declared, treating the library as a laboratory and precedents as experimental data.

The case method spread rapidly. By 1920, it dominated American legal education. By mid-century, bar associations required law school graduation for practice. The profession had inverted its priorities: information mastery became primary, client counseling secondary.

This shift built the legal profession's economic model around information asymmetry. Lawyers became valuable because they controlled access to legal knowledge. Law schools trained students to research precedents, memorize statutes, and speak in specialized language that kept the law mysterious -- and profitable.

The commoditization paradox

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally disrupted this model. When clients can ask ChatGPT about employment law and receive reasonably accurate answers in seconds, the lawyer's role as information gatekeeper vanishes.

Here's the paradox: As AI commoditizes technical skills that dominated legal education, the counseling skills long dismissed as "soft" are becoming the profession's hardest currency.

The wisdom premium

This creates what we might call the "wisdom premium." AI analyzes what the law says. Only humans determine what it means for a specific client's situation, industry relationships, company culture and long-term goals.

AI provides legal analysis. Lawyers provide legal wisdom.

California's legal system acknowledges this evolution is inevitable. Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero launched an Artificial Intelligence Task Force. Individual courts now require disclosure when AI assists in brief writing. The California Bar emphasizes that lawyers must "critically review, validate and correct" AI output to ensure it "accurately reflects and supports the interests and priorities of the client."

Notice what this guidance reveals: The profession's new core function is bridging the gap between AI's analytical power and human wisdom.

Professional identity in crisis

This transformation creates professional identity challenges, especially for new lawyers. The timing is striking: In February 2022, the ABA amended Standard 303 to require law schools to "provide substantial opportunities to students for the development of a professional identity."

The new standard defines this as understanding "what it means to be a lawyer and the special obligations lawyers have to their clients and society." Yet as students graduate into a profession where AI can pass bar exams and draft legal briefs, they face a fundamental question: What does it mean to be a lawyer when machines can do much of what we were trained to do?

This anxiety runs deeper than concerns about billable hours. It challenges the foundation of legal expertise built since Langdell. Some lawyers try to out-knowledge AI. Others recognize they must pivot to out-wisdom it.

For new attorneys entering practice, this shift offers unexpected liberation from the Langdell model that dominated their education. Rather than competing to be the most knowledgeable information processor in the room, they can focus on developing the wisdom, emotional intelligence, and client counseling skills that no algorithm can replicate.

Addressing the skeptics

Critics will argue this romanticizes Lincoln's era -- that frontier law practice bears no resemblance to modern corporate transactions or complex litigation. They'll insist today's legal problems require the information processing that Langdell's system provided.

This critique misses the point. Lincoln's era had complexity too: railroad law, emerging corporate structures, constitutional questions that would define a nation. What made Lincoln effective wasn't the simplicity of his times but his ability to serve clients' actual interests.

Complexity is precisely what AI handles best. Machines can process thousands of regulatory changes overnight, analyze contracts against vast precedent databases, and identify risks across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

What AI cannot do: Sit with a CEO facing a bet-the-company decision and help them understand whether a small legal risk is worth a large strategic opportunity. Or counsel a startup founder on whether aggressive IP protection aligns with their long-term vision.

The choice ahead

California practitioners face a defining decision. Continue competing with machines on information processing while margins compress and clients demand commodity pricing? Or embrace the Lincoln restoration -- using AI for information work while focusing on wisdom that commands premium fees?

Some attorneys making this transition are thriving. Clients don't pay for information AI provides. They pay for judgment only humans deliver.

Of course, this wisdom premium doesn't apply universally. Many legal needs are genuinely routine -- visa applications, simple wills, standard employment agreements -- where clients appropriately seek commodity pricing. AI will likely serve these markets well, and that's probably beneficial for expanding access to justice.

The transformation isn't about eliminating all technical legal work but about recognizing where human wisdom commands a premium. Not every client needs a counselor; not every legal problem requires strategic guidance. But for lawyers who want to thrive rather than merely survive the AI revolution, the path leads toward the problems that genuinely benefit from human judgment -- the decisions that keep CEOs awake at night, the family conflicts that transcend legal technicalities, the strategic choices where being right about the law matters less than being wise about people.

Consider the contrast: Machines can draft contracts but cannot read boardrooms. AI can spot legal risks but cannot gauge a CEO's appetite for battle. Algorithms can analyze precedents but cannot hold a client's hand through their worst crisis.

This is when being human becomes the ultimate advantage.

Lincoln's advice remains relevant: "Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise." Not because litigation is legally wrong, but because it often proves humanly destructive.

AI may soon access every statute and precedent ever written. But only humans can answer the question that matters most to clients facing difficult decisions: What would you do if you were me?

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author in their personal capacity and do not reflect the official position of the California Court of Appeal, Second District, or the Judicial Branch of California. This article is intended to contribute to scholarly dialogue and does not represent judicial policy or administrative guidance.