Akerman Litigation Practice Group Partner Donnie M. King and his brother Bobbie L. King Jr., Chief Legal Officer and Secretary of Shoals Technologies Group, Inc., contributed "Leading Legal Teams: The Lawyers Who Will Win the AI Era" to Corporate Counsel. Writing together as outside counsel and in-house leader — one a complex commercial litigator, the other a public company CLO — the brothers argue that the lawyers who thrive in the AI era will be defined not by their mastery of the tools alone, but by the human qualities no model can replicate.
The piece is rooted in their shared personal history. As boys in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, they lived through Hurricane Marilyn in 1995 and the hard months that followed, watching their parents hold the family together with little more than resilience and care for one another. Experiences like that one, they argue, shape lawyers at their best, and embody the part of the profession AI is not replacing.
They explain that while AI will absorb a significant share of the routine work legal departments and outside counsel have long performed, it will not replace what has always been the heart of the profession: the human judgment, instinct, and care that no algorithm can approximate. They identify four qualities that distinguish the lawyers indispensable to the executives and clients they serve: the ability to read the room, to consider those not in it, to make people feel heard, and to care genuinely about the company, the people, and the outcome.
They also contend that AI is giving back to the profession what it has long lacked: time. The lawyers who invest those recovered hours in developing those four qualities, rather than treating them as a byproduct of routine work, will be the lawyers who thrive. For lawyers at every level and on every side of the profession, their message is the same: these qualities will matter more than they ever have.