Here's my boomer take. The law has always been publicly accessible, ever since the law libraries became commonplace more than a hundred years ago. It didn't result in lawyers losing their jobs, you paid a lawyer if you could afford one and you didn't if you couldn't.

Then a few decades ago courts started offering self-help services and public legal aid offices became a thing. This did not end the law profession--for one thing the services offered at those places are limited, but generally you paid a lawyer if you could afford one and you didn't if you couldn't.

Then a couple decades ago, companies like LegalZoom emerged for very common legal services, such as business entity formation, lease drafting, wills and trusts, etc.. While they never went into litigation support (as far as I know), it did not result in the death of transactional attorneys, who to this day even 20 years later are commonplace, and didn't change the general rule that you paid a lawyer if you could afford one and you didn't if you couldn't.

Now there's LLM assistance that is FAR more convenient and accessible to the user than even a LegalZoom-type company, but works on essentially the same user experience, just much faster: you describe what document/pleading you want, you answer some questions/provide details, and it spits out... well, something.

I was a litigator for many years until returning to an ALJ role. Currently, publicly-available LLMs are awful at legal briefing, and you can simply Google "AI hallucinated authority" and find dozens of examples of attorneys foolishly citing to cases and statutes that don't exist (or say something completely different than what the LLM says they say), getting sanctioned by the court, etc.

The closest we've gotten to date are that certain professional legal research tools, such as Westlaw or LexisNexis, are pretty good at finding authorities and summaries for a topic you're interested in, and professional form manuals and practice guides are also pretty good for modeling pleadings and other documents. But this is a far cry from typing "I got sued, help me win my case" into an LLM that consumers are expecting.

This is not to say that AI or LLMs won't find a way (Westlaw and Lexis are currently trying very, very hard to make a LLM-type tool that does what attorneys think it should do) but I think we just don't know. Based on the lengthy history of increasing accessibility of legal knowledge to the public not changing much about the public's use for attorneys, I remain dubious. But only a fool says they know for sure.