The following is an English translation of an article by Juan Carlos Morris on LexLatin featuring Jonathan Brill’s keynote at the 2025 Annual Leadership and Professional Development Workshop, organized by Abogadas MX:
“In five years, an intern will be 32 times smarter than Einstein”: a futurist’s warning to the Mexican legal industry
Jonathan Brill warns that the biggest risk isn’t technology, but resisting change from the bottom up.
Tickets sold out quickly. On October 9, the Westin Santa Fe Hotel became the epicenter of a conversation as stimulating as it was necessary for the Mexican legal profession. Hundreds of people attended the 2025 Annual Leadership and Professional Development Workshop, organized by Abogadas MX—the civil association that promotes the professional careers of women lawyers in Mexico based on principles of diversity and inclusion—knowing they would hear difficult truths about the future of their industry, but also optimistic and inspiring messages about the true possibilities ahead.
Expectations were high: among other notable speakers was Jonathan Brill, a business futurist recognized by Harvard Business Review and Forbes as one of the most influential voices in innovation, who would present his vision for the future of the legal profession in the age of artificial intelligence.
Brill, a consultant to Fortune 500 companies and governments specializing in transforming uncertainty into competitive advantage, began his presentation with a story that had nothing to do with technology or law. He recounted how he nearly drowned in the ocean, caught in a current. “I had 60 seconds to live,” he said. “My lungs were full of salt water, knowing I was going to die.”
Salvation came when he stopped fighting what is technically called a rip current and remembered a forgotten lesson from his swimming teacher: currents have calm zones on the sides. All it took was a 30-foot lateral movement for the same ocean that was about to drag him down to swallow him to return him to shore. “How did I go from having 60 seconds to live to gaining another 60 years? How can small decisions dramatically change our destiny?” he asked. “That question has guided my last 25 years of research.”
The metaphor wasn’t accidental. For Brill, the legal industry today faces its own riptide: it can fight technological transformation until it exhausts itself, or it can make a smart lateral move that will bring it back to shore, transformed but alive.
The coming perfect storm
Brill identified three converging forces that will shape the next five years: massive technological change, significant economic transformation, and, particularly relevant to Mexico, accelerated regulatory change. “We can’t know when ‘rogue waves’—those collisions of forces that generate massive disruptions—will occur, but we can often know where they occur,” he explained.
For the legal industry, that collision is already underway. In the United States, the first half of 2024 saw 35 law firm mergers. “Mexico may be ahead or behind in this trend, but it is a global phenomenon,” he warned. At the same time, the debate over the ethics of AI in law is intensifying: the American Bar Association maintains that lawyers’ judgment cannot be replaced with AI, but Brill questioned whether this will still be true in three, five, or fifteen years.
The numbers he presented are compelling. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, labor efficiency in the legal sector will increase 14% between 2025 and 2030 thanks to AI, almost double the overall average of 8%. In specific areas such as document production for regulatory filings, the increase will be 70%.
Beyond ChatGPT: The Real Revolution
Brill was emphatic in distinguishing between hype and reality. “ChatGPT and similar models literally represent only 4% of the economic value being created by artificial intelligence,” he revealed. The real transformation, he explained, will come from the convergence of two types of AI that have so far operated separately.
On the one hand, there’s symbolic reasoning—”left-brain thinking,” logical and predictable, like an airplane’s autopilot or tax-preparation software. On the other, there are neural networks—”right-brain thinking,” creative but probabilistic, which can generate innovative content but also unpredictable errors.
“The challenge of the coming years is to unite these two forms to create whole-brain intelligence,” Brill explained. “And when that happens, when your intern or paralegal has access to that combination, they’ll be able to solve Einstein-like abstraction problems that only the most experienced associates can solve today.”
The example he shared was telling: Ten years ago, his team spent $80,000 on custom software to model the flow of people in a building. “In 12 to 18 months, a high school student will be able to do this in 30 minutes, for free,” he projected.
The democratization of executive judgment
But perhaps the most profound change Brill anticipated isn’t technological but organizational. He described how a researcher at the Toyota Research Institute, who used to generate six to eight design ideas a day, now produces 187 using generative AI tools. “He’s literally on a spaceship, working 365 days a year, 24 hours a day,” he explained.
This acceleration won’t be limited to technical tasks. “Every employee will have a super partner equivalent to McKinsey on their phone,” he predicted. “Your intern will have the same level of decision support that the CEO of a large company has today. They’ll have modeling tools in their pocket that are currently only available to nation states and corporations making large transactions.”
Brill shared his own experience preparing for a meeting with the Chilean government. Six years ago, it took him 60 hours of research and thousands of pages of documentation. On his recent visit, ChatGPT generated a 3,000-word summary in 45 minutes. “It wasn’t perfect, but frankly, it was better than what I had done six years earlier. I walked into meetings as an expert with 45 minutes of preparation instead of a week and a half.”
The failure of the traditional transformation model
One of the most striking statistics Brill presented was this: between 70% and 85% of digital transformations completely fail to achieve their objectives. “What other business process can fail at 70% to 85% and still be the standard?” he asked.
The reason, he explained, isn’t the technology but the implementation model. “People at the top have a vision, hire consultants who spend 15 minutes with each employee, spend $10 million or $100 million, and nothing happens.” The problem is that they never take the time to truly understand how the firm works.
This is where Brill sees the biggest opportunity for AI: “The exciting thing is that all your employees are already experimenting with it, seeing what it can do. For the first time, we can do digital transformation from the bottom up, if we choose to.”
But he also identified the biggest risk: if support staff master these tools and partners don’t, the balance of power will shift. “If your support staff knows how to use these tools and you don’t, they’ll be able to drive up their compensation costs because they control the means of production,” he warned.
Three questions for legal leaders
Brill proposed an exercise for the audience: “Tonight, when you have a moment, ask yourself three questions.”
- First: What things do we not even consider doing as an organization because no one is smart enough to do them?
- Second: If every employee were exponentially more capable, how would we do things differently?
- Third: If we had unlimited hiring capacity, what would change?
He acknowledged that the knee-jerk reaction, especially for the lawyers and risk managers in the audience, would be to reject this level of decentralized experimentation as too risky. His response? “At the end of the day, organizations in a world where innovation is accelerating need to be more innovative. They need to accept more risk from their junior people.”
The solution, he proposed, is not to prohibit but to establish new governance mechanisms. Explaining how octopuses operate differently than humans, he explained: “The tentacles explore, but only up to a certain point. There’s a range of motion allowed.” Firms must define not only how much risk their employees can take, but how little risk they can take before being penalized for lack of innovation.
The cost of inaction
The investment numbers Brill projected are significant. Spending on legal technology, currently at 3.7%, will increase to 5-6% by 2030. Knowledge management will become critical: “How do you keep your knowledge corpus together to leverage these searches and get the most out of all that data?”
But the real cost, he suggested, will not be financial but existential. He cited his own near-fatal experience in the ocean: “Ninety percent of rip current deaths occur when you’re trying to fight the tide.” The question isn’t whether AI will transform law—that’s already happening—but whether firms will fight that current to exhaustion or make the smart lateral move that saves them.
For the audience gathered at the Westin Santa Fe, mostly female lawyers working to transform a profession historically resistant to change, the message resonated particularly strongly. Abogadas MX, the nonprofit organization that organized the event, represents precisely that kind of lateral movement: not fighting head-on against existing structures, but finding the angle that allows the very forces that could destroy to ultimately propel them forward.
Brill closed with the same image he began with: himself, crawling along the beach after nearly dying, watching the sunset, wondering what had just happened. “How did I go from having 60 seconds to live to gaining another 60 years? It was a couple of small decisions that dramatically changed my destiny.”
For the Mexican legal industry, those small decisions are yet to be made.
