Legal cases often involve complex questions of law and fact that require human judgment, intuition and experience to resolve. While large language models show promise for automating some limited legal tasks, they currently lack the sophisticated reasoning skills needed to fully understand and decide legal disputes. Some recent papers have explored using LLMs to predict case outcomes or detect legal concepts and relations in text. For example, a 2019 paper developed a neural network with BiGRU encoders to encode facts and laws, combined with attention and hidden layers to predict case outcomes. They achieved 63% accuracy on a set of Indian Supreme Court cases. Another paper in 2020 proposed a hierarchical multi-task framework to jointly extract legal concepts, detect relations between sentences, and predict entailment between sentences. However, legal judgment involves subtle, complex aspects like assessing witness credibility, balancing ambiguous or conflicting laws, and considering social justice implications. LLMs today have narrow, superficial understandings of language and the world, and lack the general knowledge, logical reasoning, and social-emotional skills required to replicate human legal reasoning. They cannot match attorneys’ years of formal education and professional experience. While natural language processing will likely transform some areas of legal practice over time, human lawyers and judges will remain essential to the fair administration of justice. Their role may shift to overseeing AI systems and ensuring they are applied appropriately, but human judgment and wisdom will continue to be vital in resolving complex, consequential legal matters. Overall, we are still quite far from having AI systems with the multifaceted, nuanced reasoning abilities needed to fully take over central functions of legal professionals. But as models become more advanced, partnerships between human lawyers and AI may help improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase access to legal services. The legal profession will need to thoughtfully incorporate new technologies to stay relevant in the 21st century while upholding principles of ethics, fairness and justice.