I think it could work for some things. Years before LLMs became capable of doing anything substantial, people were selling "legal services" via websites where people could dispute trivial stuff like parking tickets, and what have you in the small courts.

Those services were usually just based on NLP + simple decision trees, and people actually won their cases.

Of course, doing huge corporate contract disputes, IP disputes, M&A, and whatever will probably be out of question for a good while. Same with more serious criminal cases where the stakes are very high.

But I think there's potential for automating away less serious cases, especially where there's good structure.

And of course, it all depends on what kind of legal system one is situated in. Immediately I'd think that Civil Law would be easier for AI lawyers, as its inherent structure is a better fit for machine reasoning. So I'd expect to see more AI products start in Civil Law countries.