Software eats services slowly, then all at once

There’s a line in Hemingway about how a man goes bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” It’s the best description I know of how software consumes a professional-services industry, and law is currently in the gradual part - which is precisely why so many people in it feel safe.

The mistake is reading the gradual phase as evidence that the sudden phase isn’t coming. In every services industry software has eaten, the long, undramatic erosion was not a reprieve. It was the setup.

What “eating” actually looks like

People imagine software replacing a service as a single event: one day you hire a lawyer, the next day you use an app instead. It never happens like that, which is why everyone underestimates it. The real process has a shape, and it’s worth knowing where law sits on it.

Phase one: software does the worst part of the job. It doesn’t replace the professional. It takes the most tedious, most mechanical slice of their work - the part they’d happily give up. Everyone’s delighted. The professional is freed for higher-value work, the service still exists, and the software is a friendly assistant. This phase feels like augmentation, and it generates a comforting consensus that the service is safe. Law is mostly here.

Phase two: software does the average part of the job. Quietly, the slice it handles grows. It moves from the worst part to the median part - not the hardest, but the typical. Now the professional is needed for less of the work, and the part they’re needed for is shrinking toward the genuinely hard cases. The service still exists, but the volume of professional time per unit of work is falling, and falling faster than anyone’s headcount planning assumed.

Phase three: software does enough of the job that the service reorganises around it. The professional is no longer the default way the work gets done - they’re the exception handler, the supervisor, the judgement-of-last-resort. The economic centre of gravity has moved from the human to the system, and the whole industry restructures around that fact, often very fast, because once it’s visible everyone moves at once. This is the “suddenly.”

The reason the third phase feels sudden is that the first two were invisible from inside. Each individual step looked like helpful augmentation. The cumulative effect - software going from doing the worst 10% to doing enough that the service reorganises around it - only becomes legible right at the end, when it’s too late to be early.

Why services people misread the gradual phase

The people inside a services industry are systematically the worst-placed to see this coming, for a reason that’s almost poetic: the gradual phase genuinely makes their lives better. Software taking the worst part of your job is a gift. You’d be mad not to enjoy it. And while you’re enjoying it, it’s quietly learning the next part.

There’s also a comforting story always available in phase one and two: “the hard part can never be automated.” And it’s true - the genuinely hard part probably can’t, for a long time. But the error is assuming the hard part is most of the job. It almost never is. In most professional work the genuinely hard, irreducibly human judgement is a thin slice sitting on top of a thick base of assembly and application. Software doesn’t need to do the hard part to eat the industry. It just needs to do enough of the base that the thin slice can’t sustain the old headcount, the old prices, or the old structure.

Law’s particular timeline

Law has two things that slow the clock: regulation and liability. You can’t fully automate work that a regulated professional has to stand behind, and that genuinely buys time. Firms point at this and relax.

They shouldn’t, because regulation and liability slow the suddenly - they don’t stop the gradually. The erosion of the base continues regardless. Each year, software does a bit more of the assembly, a bit more of the application, and the slice that genuinely requires a responsible human shrinks toward the judgement it was always meant to be. Regulation means the human never fully disappears. It does not mean the volume of human time, the prices, or the firm structure survive intact. Those reorganise around the software just the same, just a little later.

What I’d do if I were inside it

If you’re a professional watching software take the worst part of your job and feeling reassured, I’d gently suggest the opposite reading. The augmentation is real and you should take it. But understand what phase you’re in: the friendly-assistant phase is phase one, and phase one is not a destination. It’s the start of a curve that ends with the industry reorganised around the machine.

The move is not to resist the erosion - you can’t, and the early steps make you better off anyway. The move is to be the one building the software that eats your own service, on your own terms, so that when the sudden phase arrives you own the system everyone reorganises around, rather than being the headcount the reorganisation removes. Gradually is your window. Use it building, not relaxing - because suddenly is not negotiable, and it arrives without warning, precisely because the years before it felt so calm.