The Ladder's Bottom Rung Just Got Sawed Off

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/auscorp about graduate law jobs, and it’s stuck with me for a couple of days now. MinterEllison cut its grad intake by almost a third this year, and they’re not hiding why: AI. Other big firms are cutting too but keeping quiet about the reason, which is its own kind of tell. Meanwhile the UK is seeing paralegal vacancies down more than 60 per cent since 2023.

I’ve spent most of my career in tech, so I’m used to hype cycles. I’ve watched “the cloud will change everything” and “blockchain will change everything” and “the metaverse will change everything” come and mostly go, leaving behind a residue of LinkedIn posts and not much else. Part of me wants to file this under the same bin. But I don’t think I can, and that’s the uncomfortable bit.

What got me in that thread wasn’t the lawyers, it was the comment underneath about electrical engineering. Someone asked, only half joking, whether their degree was “cooked.” The replies were a mess of reassurance and dread in equal measure, which felt about right. Nobody actually knows. That’s the honest answer and it’s not a satisfying one.

Here’s the pattern that seems to be emerging, and it’s the same one a few commenters landed on: AI doesn’t turn up and eliminate a profession in one hit. It eats the bottom rung first. The junior tasks, document review, first-draft contracts, basic research, the stuff a graduate used to cut their teeth on, that’s exactly the stuff a language model is good at right now. So firms don’t need as many juniors. Which sounds efficient, until you remember that today’s junior is meant to become tomorrow’s senior. If you stop hiring at the bottom, in fifteen years you don’t have a supply of experienced people at the top either. Nobody in that thread had a good answer for what replaces that pipeline, because I don’t think there is one yet.

I’ve seen a version of this in my own patch. Junior dev roles have been thinning out for a couple of years, well before the current AI wave got properly loud, partly offshoring, partly automation, partly companies just deciding they can squeeze more out of fewer people. Add a coding assistant that can bang out boilerplate in seconds and the case for hiring a grad to do the boring stuff while they learn gets weaker every quarter. I don’t love where that points. I also can’t pretend the tools aren’t genuinely good. Both things are true at once and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

My daughter is a few years off deciding what she wants to study, and I catch myself thinking about it more than I’d like to admit. Not in a doom-and-gloom way, more a low hum of “which door do I not want her to walk into blind.” I don’t have an answer for her yet. I’m not sure anyone does, including the people building these models, who seem to alternate between warning us and selling us the thing they’re warning us about.

What frustrates me isn’t the technology, it’s the silence around what happens to the people it displaces. Company after company will quietly wind back graduate intakes while insisting it’s “market conditions,” because saying “AI did this” invites a conversation about responsibility that nobody in the boardroom wants to have. If a technology genuinely compresses the workforce needed to do a job, that’s a policy question as much as a business one, and at the moment it’s being handled entirely as the latter.

I don’t have a tidy ending here, and I’d be lying if I pretended to. The tools are remarkable. The transition looks brutal for anyone starting out right now. Both of those can be true, and pretending one cancels out the other is how we end up sleepwalking into it. The least we can do is stop calling it “market conditions” and start calling it what it is.