It is becoming a frequent refrain that the future will not need lawyers, or at least not as many of them. This is the argument made by the Susskinds in their book The Future of the Professions and it forms part of current media stories on automation and job losses. Predicting the future is generally unwise, so this paper does not challenge those forecasts directly. Instead it makes a normative claim that runs counter to these predictions – that society is better off having people with legal training in an increasingly automated future. It also makes a more specific point, being that a kind of lawyer that will increasingly be needed is one that has sufficient grasp of these new technologies to understand the ways in which they support or challenge fundamental legal norms and values. This does not mean that every law student should learn how to code, but it does mean that legal education should include opportunities to reflect on the ethical, legal and social implications of increasingly prevalent technologies. It also highlights the importance of having sufficient numbers of legal graduates with interdisciplinary expertise that enables them to make more specific and targeted critiques in relation to particular applications of artificial intelligence and technology and to build systems that will incorporate the kinds of fundamental values that are a core part of a legal education. Lawyers will be needed in the future, but only if they can work effectively alongside automated processes, with a critical awareness of their limitations. We will need lawyers to establish governance frameworks for automated decision-making, to construct expert systems creating legal documents and providing legal information, as well as to understand the relationship between intentionality in a contract and automated processes (including “smart contract” elements). Despite the rhetoric around automation, new technologies, including artificial intelligence, thus create as well as reduce legal work. But the lawyers of the future will need to be in a position to understand and challenge the roles that technology plays. And that is a challenge that universities need to take on.