Will AI Replace Legal Jobs in Uruguay? Here’s What to Do in 2025

For Uruguayan lawyers in 2025, AI is no distant threat but a fast-moving tool reshaping research, litigation support and routine review - and the firms that govern it well will win client trust, says an SGS white paper on AI governance in the legal industry; adoption is accelerating globally too, with Thomson Reuters reporting that about 65% of firms now have an AI strategy or responsible-use policy.

Practical impact is vivid: AI can scan stacks of contracts in minutes (one study found an AI reviewed NDAs in 26 seconds versus humans' 92 minutes), meaning entry-level workflows will shift toward oversight, ethics and strategy.

For lawyers and students in Uruguay the takeaway is clear - learn to prompt, validate and audit AI outputs or risk being sidelined; targeted upskilling like the AI Essentials for Work bootcamp pairs practical tool use and prompt-writing with workplace application so legal professionals can stay relevant while protecting clients.

Uruguay's legal market is well positioned to ride the AI wave - the country ranked fourth in Latin America and 51st globally on AI readiness, a practical head start for firms and in-house teams trying to modernize quickly; yet global surveys show adoption still needs structure, not just shiny tools.

Worldwide, Thomson Reuters finds about 65% of law firms now have an AI strategy or responsible-use policy and in-house teams report even higher maturity, while ediscovery studies show leading adopters reclaiming roughly 260 hours a year by leaning into generative AI - concrete signs that efficiency gains are real.

The catch for Uruguay isn't whether AI can speed up routine work (it can - one study famously had an AI review NDAs in 26 seconds versus humans' 92 minutes) but whether firms build the governance, training and cultural change to use it safely; the new AI Adoption Index stresses four pillars - alignment, access & awareness, ability & enablement, and augmentation - as the roadmap from pilot to practice.

For Uruguayan lawyers and students, the opportunity is obvious: adopt deliberately, measure outcomes, and pair machine speed with human judgment so clients benefit while professional standards stay intact.

For lawyers in Uruguay, AI is a powerful workhorse and a careful partner: tools can cut research and document review from days to minutes, surface relevant precedents across millions of pages, automate contract clause-spotting and draft initial templates, and run e‑discovery or client intake chat flows so teams focus on strategy and client care (see Emitrr's overview of AI for law firms and Abstracta's analysis of generative AI benefits for legal work); at the same time these systems stumble on nuance - they can “hallucinate” false citations, mishandle confidential inputs, and offer overconfident predictions unless wrapped in governance, verification and secure deployment.

Practical takeaway for Uruguayan firms and students: use AI to scale routine throughput and predictive insight, but keep humans in the loop for judgment, negotiation and ethical review, require human verification of citations and privileged data handling, and consider local partners with regional presence (for example, Abstracta's regional teams) when building tailored copilots or integrating drafting assistants like those described in Thomson Reuters' AI drafting guide.

“lawyers will shift their focus from routine activities to much more high value work involved in shaping strategies and navigating complex legal problems.”

In Uruguay the career map for young lawyers is shifting from grunt work to guardianship: as global studies warn that entry-level roles may decline and firms rethink hiring, juniors are moving away from hours of keyword searches and first-pass reviews toward quality‑assurance, client-facing tasks and managing AI workflows; the same AI that once reviewed NDAs in 26 seconds versus humans' 92 minutes now creates an expectation that new hires can prompt, validate and contextualize machine output rather than simply produce it.

Firms and students should treat this as an opportunity - Uruguayan employers can redeploy talent into higher‑value roles (litigation strategy, client counselling, AI oversight, and prompt engineering) while law schools and in‑house trainers design experiential programs so juniors still learn judgment and drafting.

Early hiring data is mixed, so practical moves matter: list legal‑AI tool experience on CVs, demand supervised AI training on the job, and push firms to create structured rotations that blend AI‑augmented workflows with hands‑on mentorship (see trends in IE's overview of AI in law and Vault's reporting on how AI is changing entry‑level work).

“AI isn't going to replace a lawyer, but a lawyer who understands how to use AI will replace an attorney who does not.”

Regulation, ethics and professional duty in Uruguay form a practical backbone for how AI should be used in law: national codes stress integrity, confidentiality, competence and accountability, and the Colegio de Abogados del Uruguay enforces detailed standards that make client secrecy non‑negotiable (see the overview of Uruguay's professional ethics at Law Gratis: Uruguay professional ethics overview); the country's strong institutional transparency - Uruguay was ranked among the most transparent in Latin America and maintains robust public institutions - means regulators expect clear, auditable rules for new technologies (core ethical principles (Law Gratis); U.S. State Department 2018 investment climate report for Uruguay).

Practically, that translates into three duties for local lawyers: (1) protect client confidentiality when routing data through AI systems and prefer secure, on‑shore controls where required (the government's e‑gov agency, AGESIC, and national data‑center investments like ANTEL's tier‑III facility underline the infrastructure and oversight expectations); (2) maintain competence - lawyers must document how they validate AI outputs and stay current with verification practices promoted in ethical‑safeguards guidance; and (3) be accountable via complaint mechanisms or the Defensor del Pueblo when breaches occur.

For Uruguayan firms and junior lawyers the rule is simple and sharp: speed from AI is useful, but ethical duty means human review, secure deployment and written governance - no shortcut around professional responsibility (ethical safeguards and AI verification guidance for Uruguayan legal practice).

Practical steps for Uruguayan lawyers and law students in 2025 are straightforward and local: treat AI literacy as mandatory continuing education (look to CLE-style programs that cover ethics, verification and tool‑use), get hands‑on with a shortlist of legal AI tools and document your workflows, and insist on employer‑led, supervised AI training so newcomers learn verification and client‑confidentiality practices rather than blind reliance.

Start with bite‑sized courses and pathway programs (for deeper study consider executive certificates in AI governance like IE's program), plug into Uruguay's national capacity‑building and ethics workstreams to understand local expectations (see Oxford Insights on Uruguay's AI readiness), and map a continuous learning plan that blends classroom, CLE, and practical labs - Nucamp's practical guides and prompts are good places to practice prompting, secure data handling and review checkpoints.

On CVs, highlight specific tool experience and documented supervised projects; in interviews describe a small audit routine you follow when checking AI outputs.

Imagine converting an afternoon‑long contract review into a short, auditable checklist that still ends with a human sign‑off - that's the new, defensible baseline for practice in Uruguay.

“AI is something every student needs to understand, no matter what kind of law they want to do.”

Policy and firm-level strategies in Uruguay should pair the country's reputation for legal certainty with targeted services that welcome the 2025‑29 investment wave: legal teams can position themselves to support public‑private partnerships and infrastructure projects - backed by the MTOP's planned ~US$2bn spend - by building practice groups focused on procurement, concessions and tax incentives, and by packaging fast, auditable compliance services for investors who value stability (see the MTOP investment plan and the Investment Promotion Law).

Firms should also lean into Uruguay's role as a regional hub for European investors - strengthening cross‑border capabilities and ESG expertise (more than 90% of electricity comes from renewables) to advise on green‑hydrogen, energy and logistics deals - while tracking extended promotional regimes and procedural deadlines that affect large projects.

Practically: create multidisciplinary teams (law + tax + tech), offer fixed‑fee transactional bundles for inbound FDI, formalize AI governance and data‑security clauses in client engagements, and cultivate partnerships with established regional advisors so firms capture the advisory work around rail, ports and logistics modernization.

These moves translate Uruguay's macro stability into concrete competitive advantage for local practices and their clients.

“Uruguay is an extraordinary country. Its political stability and democratic quality are exceptional and unparalleled in Latin America.”

Conclusion and a simple 2025 checklist for beginners in Uruguay: treat AI readiness as required professional training - start by studying Uruguay's public AI strategy and ethics framework to understand national expectations (Uruguay's AI Strategy for Digital Government) and follow capacity‑building guidance like Oxford Insights recommends to align tool use with local rules; next, build hands‑on skills in prompting, verification and secure workflows (consider a practical program such as the Nucamp AI Essentials for Work that teaches prompt writing and workplace application); insist on documented human‑in‑the‑loop checks and data‑security clauses at your firm so faster AI outputs remain auditable; re-skill toward oversight, client counselling and AI‑enabled quality assurance (these are the high‑value roles Bloomberg Law and Deloitte flag as in demand); and finally, make AI experience explicit on CVs and ask employers for supervised AI training - imagine converting an afternoon‑long contract review into a short, auditable checklist that still ends with a human sign‑off, and use that checklist as tangible proof of competence when applying for junior roles.