Basepoint

Journal / Insights

Is AI replacing paralegals?

AI is not cutting paralegal jobs, but it is holding them flat. What BLS data shows, what AI does well, and what law firms should do.

BBranson·Oct 30, 2026·5 min read

Quick answer: No, but it is stopping the job from growing. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects paralegal and legal assistant employment to show little or no change from 2025 to 2035, going from 404,900 jobs to 403,800, and names AI as the reason. BLS still expects about 40,800 openings a year over that decade, mostly from people who retire or move to other work.

What the numbers say

The clearest data comes from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, last updated in August 2026. It counted 404,900 paralegals and legal assistants in the US in 2025, with a median pay of $62,890 a year in May 2025. It projects 403,800 of those jobs in 2035, a loss of 1,100. Jobs across all occupations are projected to grow 3 percent over the same period.

BLS is direct about why. Demand for these workers "is expected to be limited by advances in technology, including artificial intelligence (AI)," the handbook says. It expects AI to make paralegals more efficient at research and document preparation, which may reduce how many firms need.

Other research points the same way. A March 2023 Goldman Sachs Research report estimated that 44 percent of current work tasks in legal occupations could be automated by AI, second only to administrative work at 46 percent. That is a share of tasks, not jobs. The same report expected most jobs to be complemented by AI rather than replaced.

The legal profession expects the change soon. Thomson Reuters' Future of Professionals report, published in June 2025 from a survey of 2,275 professionals in legal, tax, accounting and related fields, found that 80 percent believe AI will have a high or transformational impact on their profession within five years.

So the honest answer is that the paralegal job is not disappearing, but it has stopped growing, and the reason is software. Law firms and other legal services employers still hold 75 percent of these jobs, and BLS still sees about 40,800 open roles each year.

What AI does well in paralegal work

BLS lists the core duties: gather the facts of a case, research laws and regulations, organize legal documents, draft correspondence and contracts, file documents, and schedule interviews and depositions. Several of these are now a good fit for AI, especially the high volume, structured parts:

  • Taking in new client inquiries and turning them into a clean intake record with the key facts.
  • Reading a contract against the firm's standard positions and flagging clauses that differ.
  • Producing first drafts of routine letters and standard agreements from the firm's templates.
  • Pulling dates from court notices and correspondence and putting deadlines on the calendar with reminders.
  • Sorting and summarizing large document sets so a person reads the important ones first.

In each case the AI does the first pass. A person still decides what matters. The Thomson Reuters 2025 survey found that respondents expected AI to save them about 5 hours a week within the next year.

What AI still gets wrong

Legal research is the clearest warning. A 2024 Stanford study of leading AI legal research tools found that Lexis+ AI and Ask Practical Law AI produced incorrect information more than 17 percent of the time, and Westlaw's AI-Assisted Research more than 34 percent of the time. These are tools built for lawyers, not general chatbots. An earlier study cited in the same report found general chatbots were wrong 58 to 82 percent of the time on legal queries.

A citation that looks right but is wrong is worse than no citation. It costs a lawyer time to find, and it can reach a court. The hard cases in daily work are predictable:

  • A case or statute that sounds relevant but does not say what the summary claims.
  • A clause that is standard on paper but risky given what the client said on the phone.
  • A deadline that depends on how a court counts days or on a local rule.
  • Anything that needs a judgment about the client, the other side, or strategy.

An AI can flag these. It should not decide them. This is why every legal agent we build acts only on what it is sure about and sets the unsure items aside for a person to confirm.

How the paralegal role is changing

Fewer hours go to typing, sorting, and chasing dates. More go to checking AI output, managing files, and talking to clients. The paralegal who can review a first draft quickly, catch the wrong citation, and explain to a lawyer why a clause is off is worth more than one who only produces the draft.

Thomson Reuters' 2026 Future of Professionals report, based on a survey of 1,816 professionals in March and April 2026, found that 74 percent already use AI tools every week. It also found that one third of lawyers, accountants, and compliance professionals use AI tools their organization has not approved. That second number matters for law firms. If the firm does not give staff a safe tool, many will use an unsafe one with client data.

What a law firm should do

The practical steps are simple:

  1. List the tasks your paralegals and legal assistants do each week, and mark the ones that are high volume and rule based.
  2. Start with lower risk work: intake, deadline tracking, first drafts, and contract review against your standard positions.
  3. Keep a lawyer as the reviewer. Anything that reaches a client or a court is checked by a person who is accountable for it.
  4. Give staff an approved tool, with clear rules on what client data it may touch.
  5. Retrain your paralegals rather than replace them. They know your files and your clients, which makes them the right people to review the AI's work.

That is the setup we build at Basepoint. Our AI legal assistant works as an AI paralegal for law firms. It handles client intake, contract review, first drafts, and deadline tracking, and your lawyers always review its work. It acts on what it is sure about and sets anything uncertain aside for a person to confirm.

Sources

B

Branson Tiong

Founder of Basepoint Labs

Keep reading

All posts →

Insights · 5 min read

Will AI replace accountants?

BLS expects accountant jobs to grow 5% to 2035 even with AI. What that means for 2030 and 2050, which work is exposed, and what to do.

Oct 30, 2026

Insights · 4 min read

Why are CPAs declining?

Fewer accounting graduates and the 150 credit hour rule shrank the CPA pipeline. What the data shows, and why it is starting to turn.

Oct 30, 2026

Insights · 5 min read

Can AI do my bookkeeping?

AI can do most routine bookkeeping today. How AI features in QuickBooks, Xero and others compare with a managed AI bookkeeper.

Oct 30, 2026