Earlier this week, it was reported that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (and Andy and I both attended Scarsdale High School in the suburbs of New York City back in the day) said the size of Amazon’s workforce will shrink due to AI.

In a June 17, 2025 email to Amazon employees that was shared across the internet, Jassy communicated the following: “As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

Of course, Amazon is a huge company with a very large workforce. According to Statistica, Amazon has 1.5+ million employees, so it makes good business sense for such a very high profile and large employer like Amazon to continue to look for opportunities to manage its expenses.

However, Jassy’s email brings up a hot topic in our era of AI. Namely, what will AI’s impact be on the job market moving forward.

I believe this is also a hot topic in the legal industry. What sort of impact will AI have on the future employment opportunities for lawyers and legal professionals?

My personal opinion is that the growth of AI over time will mean that companies and law firms will have less of a need for humans in the form of lawyers and legal professionals as advanced AI tools are increasingly able to perform some of the traditional repetitive and routine tasks – and at a high level as these tools get better over time – that been performed by those in the legal profession.

In addition to the fact that AI tools will be able to do some of the work that is and will be delivered by lawyers and legal professionals, I believe that large in-house legal departments and “BigLaw” will reduce the size of their legal teams as AI advances largely because of these reasons:

  • “Rinse and Repeat”: I think large in-house legal departments and BigLaw will look at what the Amazons and other large tech companies are saying and doing regarding their employees in this era of AI, learn from their practices and essentially “rinse and repeat” what they are doing.
  • Increased Legal Budget Constraints: Given growing uncertainty in the geopolitical and business environments, legal departments and laws firms may face increasing pressures to reduce their budgets and operational costs. Assuming that is the case, deploying advanced AI tools and seeing their benefits to perform legal tasks may incentivize these organizations to accelerate their efforts to reduce headcount and increasingly rely on those AI solutions.
  • AI Return on Investment (“ROI”) Realization: AI solutions are not cheap, and they require significant financial investment. As AI solutions in the legal space become more mainstream, I believe that legal organizations will want to accelerate their ROIs on their respective AI investments in the form of optimizing their headcounts and reducing expenses.
  • Maximize Profits: Legal departments and BigLaw are in the business of maximizing shareholder and partner value. Any opportunity to use technology in a manner to both serve their clients well to enable business and to manage their costs are welcomed in Corporate America.

So, the reality is that lawyers and legal professionals will not be immune from the potential negative job implications of an increasingly AI-world.

What this means for lawyers and legal professionals moving forward is that they need to actively embrace and skill-up on AI solutions to help them do their jobs in a more productive, efficient and faster manner. Doing so will also enable lawyers and legal professionals to free up their time to perform even more high-value and high-impact work for their companies and their clients. As a result, it may help differentiate lawyers and legal professionals who are AI “power users” and perhaps make them a little less easily replaceable.