The Chicago based multinational law firm Baker McKenzie is laying off up to a thousand employees as part of its pivot to embracing AI, the legal hub RollOnFriday reports. In what might be an augury of how further AI related cuts could sweep other industries, it’s not the lawyers getting the axe, but instead hundreds of their support staff. These include “dozens of roles in London and Belfast,” and hundreds across functions including know-how, research, marketing, and secretarial, according to the reporting. The law firm’s reported layoffs come after Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork AI agent sparked a panicked sell off that sent the stock market plunging last week. Hallucinating AIs have been such a thorn in law firms’ sides that one firm adopted the desperate measure of employing its own AI to catch LLM usage.