Editorial: more and more lawyers will look for jobs because of AI, and talking about it is not defeatism

Asked this week in El País whether artificial intelligence will take work away from lawyers, the president of Cuatrecasas, Luis Pérez de Ayala, answered with unusual frankness: "Will there be fewer lawyers? Perhaps. Will structures change? Perhaps. But we will remain necessary."

We keep both halves of the sentence, because both are true at once. The profession does not disappear: judgment, negotiation and responsibility before a client need a person. But the structure of legal employment is already changing, and it will change faster than the profession itself. We see it in the data: 88% of small firms already use AI, according to a survey reported by El Confidencial, and the latest Signium and UFV report shows a market that pays more and more for senior talent and less and less for bringing in base-level staff: the biggest 2025 increases went to senior associates and directors, the smallest to trainees and juniors.

The transition is not only for the big firms

When AI and legal employment come up, people usually think of the big firms. But most of the Spanish profession works in small practices or alone, and there the change is more direct: if a client can solve the simple matter with a tool, the work that remains is what demands judgment, specialisation or presence. That pushes many lawyers towards three moves: specialise, change area, or look for a stable job after years of independent practice.

That is why at Agente Lex we treat legal employment as a central question and not as a noticeboard. Every morning we publish a selection of verified offers, checked one by one at the original link. We maintain market guides such as the one on job offers for lawyers in Madrid, we publish salaries with their source, as in What a lawyer earns in Spain, and we cover the career and transition line: which areas are growing, which profiles firms ask for and how to move from one to another.

The new roles are already here

The other side of the transition is the positions that did not exist five years ago: legal operations managers, AI governance and compliance specialists, data protection officers, legaltech lawyers. The profession itself is organising to adapt: conferences like the 24th JAC legaltech day on 17 November pack the year's digital-law review into a single day, and our Legal AI section documents every week which tools are entering firms and with what guarantees. We will cover those new positions in the daily selection with the same rigour as the traditional ones.

What we commit not to do

1. Not to publish unverified offers. If the original link does not work, the offer does not go in.
2. Not to inflate figures. The salaries we publish will come from cited reports, not from our own estimates.
3. Not to sell fear. AI will close some positions and create others - legal ops, compliance, data protection, AI governance -; we will report both movements with the same cool head.

It is the same standard with which we verify everything we publish, and which we explain in How we verify information at Agente Lex, inside our Opinion section. And we ask the same of firms: send us your real offers, with the original link, so they reach the people who need them; publishing is free. The profession's transition will be the labour story of the next decade. Our job is for lawyers to read it here with data, not with noise. It will be in our Legal jobs section every day.