The Post-AGI Law Firm: Re-Pricing Trust and Restructuring Cross-Border Legal Services

Track 2 asks how ubiquitous advanced AI reshapes labor markets in knowledge-intensive domains. We forecast a specific reorganization of cross-border legal services: as general-purpose systems commoditize research, translation, and first-draft drafting, the scarce input becomes trust work—the production of defensible commitments under uncertainty. We formalize a decomposition of legal value into low-marginal-cost commodity cognition and high-assurance trust work (risk allocation, negotiation strategy, governance of agentic workflows, and accountability artifacts). From this decomposition we derive three market-structure hypotheses: (i) further erosion of time-based billing toward subscription, outcome-linked, and risk-sharing fees; (ii) bifurcation between high-volume legal platforms and high-assurance boutiques differentiated by auditability and reputational capital; and (iii) growth of dispute-resolution design as a complementary market because enforcement risk becomes the main brake on transaction velocity. We propose a new professional role—Legal Assurance Engineer—and outline a Tiny-Paper evaluation plan that maps tasks in a representative cross-border deal to substitutable cognition, trust requirements, and failure costs, then tests how governance artifacts (logs, model passports, solver-checked reasoning, and disclosure clauses) shift those costs.