> AI legal assistants will be incredibly valuable for a large swath of the population

In my experience they're a boon to the other side.

Using AI to help prepare your case for presentation to a lawyer is smart. Using it to actually interact with an adversary's lawyer is very, very dumb. I've seen folks take what should have been a slam-dunk case and turn it into something I recommended a company fight because they were clearly using an AI to write letters, the letters contained categorically false representations, and those lies essentially tanked their credibility in the eyes of the, in one case, arbitrator, in another, the court. (In the first case, they'd have been better off representing themselves.)