A nonprofit legal aid organization is introducing an AI tool that drafts first-pass summaries of case intake forms. Leadership must decide how to redefine paralegal roles now that the tool handles initial drafting. Which role change best balances human strengths with the AI tool's capabilities?

Shifting paralegals toward reviewing AI-drafted summaries for accuracy and nuance, and toward client interviews that call for empathy and judgment, redirects their legal expertise to exactly the tasks a drafting tool can't do well. Reassigning paralegals entirely to unrelated administrative work throws away that expertise instead of redirecting it, wasting the very skills that make oversight of the AI-assisted process possible. Having paralegals ignore the AI tool and keep drafting every summary manually forfeits the efficiency gain altogether and isn't really a role change at all — it's just the old process running alongside an unused tool. Asking paralegals to rewrite every AI draft word-for-word to match their own prior style misunderstands what oversight is for; the goal is catching substantive errors and missing nuance, not enforcing a personal writing style, and rewriting everything from scratch erases any time saved. The mechanism that makes the correct answer work: it moves human effort toward review, judgment, and interpersonal work — the categories AI drafting tools are weakest at — rather than either competing with the tool or discarding the paralegal's expertise. A useful check for any AI-assisted role redesign: does the new role ask people to do what they're uniquely good at, or does it just add friction on top of the AI's output?