By Aku Nikkola, lawyer and CEO – Legit AI Oy
Does the legal profession die when legal know-how becomes open and accessible to everyone?
Throughout human history, understanding laws, contracts, and other legal texts has been the privilege of a few. Between the person subject to a right or an obligation and the rule itself, there has always stood an expensive interpreter: the lawyer.
Those who are not lawyers themselves, or who could not afford one, have always been in the weaker position in our rule-based society. Think of a contractual dispute where a lawyer faces a layperson, an ordinary citizen. In that situation, does it matter more who is right, or who has more legal expertise? Exactly.
In the age of AI, lawyers have further underlined their position of power by pointing to AI’s inability to produce, interpret, and find legal content.
I speak from experience. Those were my own comments about AI from 2022 to 2025.
Then the year turned, Claude was updated, and AI turned out to be capable of all of it. There was little left to correct in the AI’s interpretations and texts, if anything.
The same thing has already happened in software development, where developers have lost their throne to vibe-coding laypeople, ordinary citizens who need to understand nothing about programming in order to create working, useful applications.
A strong open-source culture and the free sharing of knowledge accelerated that shift. Stack Overflow, GitHub, open source. Even before AI, knowledge and skills were shared remarkably openly.
In law, the situation has always been the opposite. Unlike in software development, lawyers have made themselves important by keeping all the knowledge to themselves. Law has no concept of open source.
That is exactly why I taught an AI the skills of a Finnish lawyer and gave it to everyone for free. But what’s the sense in that?
This is not the first time someone has tried to “ruin” a closed field with openness. When Linus Torvalds released Linux for free in 1991, the model seemed absurd. Microsoft took it seriously all the same. In 1998 the company’s internal memos leaked — the Halloween documents — in which Linux was described as an existential threat and openness as a force that had to be suppressed.
Linux was not destroyed. It now runs the internet, cloud services, and AI. Microsoft itself uses Linux too.
Change in the legal field is inevitable, and just like software developers, lawyers will have to find their purpose again. It was hardly ever the gatekeeper role it grew into over thousands of years.
Software development was not ruined. It was democratised. Law will not be ruined by openness either.
Aku Nikkola
lawyer, CEO
13 April 2026
The writer is Finland’s leading AI expert in the legal field.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/akunikkola/
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