AI could increase antitrust lawyer jobs, not take them away

The rise of AI presents an unparalleled opportunity for antitrust teams in law firms to increase revenue, win new clients, and offer new antitrust services to clients. At a time when many lawyers are questioning whether AI will someday take their jobs, there is the potential for it to create new jobs for antitrust lawyers who are able to harness it effectively and adopt it as a core part of client strategy. Here are four reasons why AI could lead to an increase in work for antitrust teams in law firms who use it properly:

1️⃣ Due diligence on more deals

The cost of due diligence by private equity and other firms looking at investing in companies is going to collapse as AI agent swarms can do huge amounts of useful initial analysis. The more companies they do due diligence on, the more deals competition lawyers will need to advise on, at least at the early stage. They are going to need to do more merger control/FDI filing analysis and substantive risk analysis.

2️⃣ Competition authorities will be more active as they benefit from AI efficiencies

When thousands of documents can be reviewed nearly instantly at nearly no cost and information gathered at rapid pace, the resources required for investigations by competition authorities for investigations will be considerably lower. Budget-constrained competition authorities will be able to bring more competition investigations, creating more work for competition lawyers to advise on.

3️⃣ More cartels will be detected

AI will make it much easier for firms to identify where their employees have engaged in cartel-like behaviour, increasing detection rates. Obviously that does not mean that firms are always going to be blowing the whistle (in part due to follow-on damages risks), but they will certainly need advice from competition lawyers on what to do when they detect cartels. The General Court’s Michelin judgement showed how the European Commission is trying to detect anti-competitive activity in novel areas like capital markets communications through machine learning, and AI is 1000 times more advanced than when they did that.

4️⃣ AI will create new competition law concerns

AI is transforming companies and the economy and there is going to be lots of concerns and accusations around abuse of dominance, data, etc. Every competition authority is already looking at this. Think about how much work was created for competition lawyers over concerns about BigTech in the past decade. Some lawyers built their whole careers on it.

AI is improving at a dramatic rate, and as this continues these trends will grow stronger. However, it presents challenges as well as opportunities. Firms need to adapt AI effectively to harness the benefits; otherwise they risk being left behind as AI-first antitrust teams win the new work and outpace slow adopters.