The Human Advantage in an AI-Driven Workplace with Jodie Hill
AI is making legal work faster. It can draft documents, review policies, analyse information and help lawyers get through tasks that once swallowed hours of the working day.
For a profession that has long wrestled with workload, burnout and pressure, that sounds like an obvious win. However, faster does not automatically mean better!
In the final episode of our Q3 series exploring Artificial Intelligence vs Human Intelligence, Laura Hearn, Content & Brand Manager at Consortium, speaks with Jodie Hill, Founder and Managing Partner of Thrive Law, a specialist employment law and HR firm built around a very different idea of what professional life can look like.
Their conversation moves from mental health and neurodiversity to AI, difficult conversations, junior lawyers and the future workplace. Running through all of it is one question: as technology takes on more of the work, what becomes more valuable about the humans left doing it?
Wellbeing cannot sit on the sidelines
Thrive Law was born from a deeply personal experience.
In 2017, Jodie was struggling significantly with her mental health and came close to leaving the profession altogether. What eventually became clear was that the problem lay less in the law itself, and more in the environment in which she was practising it.
Flexible working, supportive colleagues and greater control over how she worked made a tangible difference. When Jodie later looked across the profession, she saw plenty of organisations talking about mental health, but very few treating it as part of business strategy.
Free fruit, yoga sessions and wellbeing initiatives may have their place, but they cannot compensate for a culture that rewards overwork, leaves managers unequipped to support people and makes employees afraid to admit when they are struggling.
That became part of the thinking behind Thrive Law – wellbeing, inclusion and belonging wouldn’t just be initiatives sitting alongside the business, but forces that shaped how the business itself operated.
The problem is rarely a lack of policy
For Jodie, one of the biggest gaps she sees across workplaces has less to do with good intentions and more to do with confidence, specifically, the confidence to have difficult conversations. Organisations may have policies covering mental health, neurodiversity, reasonable adjustments and inclusion, but those policies are only useful if the people responsible for implementing them actually know what to do when an employee asks for help. Often, managers simply don’t.
The result is that requests become unnecessarily formal, employees get passed from person to person, and something that might have been resolved through an early conversation turns into a much bigger problem.
This is one area where Jodie believes AI can really help. Through her work with Thomas International, she’s been involved with an AI coaching tool designed to help managers prepare for difficult conversations by considering the personality and behavioural traits of the person they’re speaking to. Used that way, AI plays a supporting role, for example, helping a human being have a better conversation, rather than standing in for it.
AI can help you communicate, but cannot care for you
That distinction becomes especially important when communication is sensitive. AI can draft an empathetic email, suggest supportive language, and even help someone structure a conversation they’re nervous about having. But Jodie warns against confusing the appearance of empathy with the real thing… copying an AI-generated response and sending it without thinking about the person receiving it can have exactly the opposite effect, because people are often remarkably good at recognising when something sounds polished but impersonal.
The same applies to clients. Jodie considered introducing an AI chatbot for some of Thrive Law’s HR clients, but the research produced a clear response: they wanted to speak to a person. It had less to do with whether an AI system could answer the question, but more to do with the fact that sometimes people need more than an answer. They need someone to listen!
Employment law comes wrapped in frustration, fear, commercial pressure, damaged relationships and uncertainty. A client might ask what the law says, but what they actually need could be reassurance, strategy, challenge or help deciding what to do next. That’s where human connection starts to become part of the professional service itself.
When AI makes conflict worse
One of the more unexpected consequences of AI is already showing up in workplace disputes. Employees can now produce lengthy grievances and legal arguments within minutes, but Jodie says the problem is that those documents aren’t always accurate, proportionate or particularly helpful. A relatively straightforward request for support can quickly turn into a 20-page argument quoting the wrong law and making allegations the employee might never have raised without AI nudging them towards a more adversarial position.
The employer then has to respond, positions harden, and what might once have been solved through a conversation becomes a formal dispute. AI has made it easier to construct an argument; however, that doesn’t mean it’s made it any easier to resolve one.
For employment lawyers and HR professionals, this creates a new challenge. Increasingly, the task is about looking beyond the document in front of them and understanding what the person actually wants to achieve. Sometimes the best legal response isn’t a longer one.
Neurodiversity exposes the danger of assumptions
Jodie’s work around neurodiversity reinforces the same point from another direction. Behaviour in the workplace is constantly being interpreted: someone interrupts in a meeting, arrives late, communicates very directly, or struggles with a particular task. It’s easy to assign a motive to that behaviour based on how we ourselves would act in the same situation, but those assumptions can be completely wrong.
Jodie speaks openly about how ADHD can show up in her own behaviour, from direct communication and interrupting through to time blindness. What another person reads as rude or disrespectful may have an entirely different explanation, which is why she encourages managers to ask questions before reaching conclusions.
The same principle matters when assessing performance. Is somebody genuinely performing poorly, or are they working in an environment that has failed to make relatively simple adjustments that would allow them to perform well? Good management requires enough curiosity to find out. Technology may help identify patterns or suggest questions, but inclusion ultimately depends on one person being willing to understand another.
The shortcut problem for junior lawyers
The arrival of AI also changes what it means to begin a career in law. Many of the tasks traditionally given to junior lawyers, research, early drafting, document review happen to be exactly the areas where AI is advancing fastest.
Jodie doesn’t see that as a reason for junior lawyers to fear for their careers, though she does think they need to approach the technology carefully. Her advice is simple: never let AI replace your thinking. Treat its output as though it’s been produced by someone junior to you; check it, challenge it, verify the law, improve the language, and ask whether it actually answers the client’s question. Most importantly, never accept the first draft simply because producing another one takes seconds.
The risk is that the race for productivity creates a generation of lawyers who can produce work extremely quickly without developing the analytical judgement to know whether that work is any good. Junior lawyers therefore have an opportunity to become the human checkpoint: AI can accelerate the process, but their value comes from deciding whether the result deserves to leave the building.
Faster is not always the same as more valuable
There’s an understandable excitement around AI-driven productivity. Tasks become quicker, fixed-fee work becomes easier to deliver profitably, and more can potentially be achieved with fewer hours. But Jodie raises an important warning about what happens when speed becomes the objective in itself.
Lawyers still need time to think, check and understand what a client is actually asking for, and employers need time to listen to the people working for them. Strip too much of that away in the pursuit of efficiency, and the profession risks becoming faster at producing work while getting worse at understanding the people the work is for.
The opportunity presented by AI is therefore bigger than automation. If technology removes some of the grind from legal work, the real question becomes what lawyers choose to do with the time it gives back, and increasingly, the answer may lie in the things machines struggle with most: thinking deeply, asking better questions, building trust, and having the conversations people would rather avoid.
Four practical takeaways
AI should make human conversations better, not become a reason to avoid having them. In practice, that means a few things:
- Build wellbeing and inclusion into how the organisation operates, rather than treating them as standalone initiatives.
- Use AI to prepare, analyse and draft, but keep human judgement at the centre of decisions involving people.
- Ask questions before making assumptions about behaviour, performance or motivation.
- For junior lawyers, use AI as a first draft and a learning tool, never as a substitute for developing your own analytical skills.
The legal profession will undoubtedly become more automated, but that doesn’t make its human skills any less important; if anything, it may make them the very thing clients, colleagues and employers value most.
You can listen to the full episode on our website, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.