AFRs Lunch with Nick Abrahams 25 September 2026

Back somersault with a twist: This AI lawyer’s unusual career

AI won’t take your job, but it can make you lazy, warns Nick Abrahams, whose career has taken more than one unusual turn.

Futurist, founder and comedian Nick Abrahams with Lucy Dean.

A few weeks before we meet, lawyer and futurist Nick Abrahams sends a text suggesting we have lunch at legendary Soho restaurant Quo Vadis.

The name of the establishment translates to “Where are you going?” , which one suspects is also the driving question behind his autobiographical comedy show, The Accidental Lawyer, a performance of which is why Abrahams – founder of LawPath and former partner at Norton Rose Fulbright – is in the UK.

At Quo Vadis, London is suffering through another heatwave, yet inside, it’s quiet and cool. There’s little to suggest that the address dubbed the Great Dame of Dean Street once housed a brothel, or that preceding the 100-year-old restaurant’s tenure Karl Marx had resided upstairs, where he wrote the first volume of Das Kapital.

It seems apt that our lunch takes place in a restaurant that has lived several lives. Abrahams, after all, has done the same.

“I’m afflicted with a certain sense of reckless optimism,” he explains. “I do have a strong belief that life is an adventure, and there are risks to be taken.”

Abrahams has worked with George Clooney on ER and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant on cyber-security, founded a comedy club in Japan and an AI-powered legal company in Australia. Then there was his 25-year stint at Norton Rose Fulbright, where he was global co-leader of digital transformation. In 2018, he rolled out Parker, a before-its-time AI chatbot which could be used to answer simple questions about data protection and privacy laws.

Abrahams In action at a stand-up comedy club in Tokyo in the 1990s.

It’s a career full of sharp turns. The most recent, his pivot away from Norton Rose Fulbright in September has been in the works since a nasty bout of tinnitus in early 2020 made him reconsider everything.

“It was an incredibly bad part of my life, and I came very close to actually doing something very, very bad. Like perilously close.”

For months, a sound like a leafblower had been ringing in his ears. He thought it was the result of an ear-syringing and wax cleaning procedure gone wrong. All the doctors told him it was tinnitus, and that he’d just learn to live with it. This proved nearly impossible.

“I completely absented myself from the family. I couldn’t go to work. The last time I went to work and was in a meeting, my skin was crawling with anxiety. I had to get up and leave. It was debilitating beyond belief.”

After three months, he found an audiologist who used a vacuum to clear the wax on his eardrum. He left that appointment totally fixed and with a new purpose.

“Because I came so close to doing something very bad, I thought, I’ve got to make the most of the rest of my life.”

He knew he wanted to see how far he could go combining his professional speaking expertise with comedy, while also focusing harder on his AI line of work. He set a five-year countdown to when he would leave Norton Rose Fulbright.

We pause. Our waiter is waiting. He has an entertaining take on service. When he apologised for taking a few minutes to take our drinks orders he added a cryptic rider: “I was tied up with my big criminal conspiracy”. Now it’s time for the next act as he prods us to make some food choices.

“Why don’t I take a page out of Elvis’s book?” he asks. Then he warbles: “A little less conversation, a little more action please.”

We quickly settle on half a dozen oysters and grilled courgettes to share for entree and both order the lamb main course. We already have our grüner veltliner, and one glass of wine each is enough.

Our waiter is pleased. We’re pleased. Back to the interview.

For Abrahams, this new chapter is about past passions and future dreams.

As an overweight, red-headed, freckle-faced and frequently-bullied child growing up in Brisbane, he dreamed of becoming a big-shot Hollywood producer.

This desire to entertain and create stories (he was particularly inspired by M*A*S*H) led him to open a comedy club in Tokyo in the mid-1990s. While in Tokyo, he also acted and created a short-lived Japanese TV show, The Ugly Gaijin Brothers.

A few years later, he got his masters in film and television at the University of Southern California, which led to a four-year stint in Hollywood working as a creative executive on shows including huge hits such as ER and The West Wing from 1998 to 2001.

“One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about is Aaron Sorkin and how he writes the way a lawyer presents an argument in court. So if you think about A Few Good Men, what Sorkin does is throw you some sort of moral formula: ‘Is it okay to do a barbaric act for the greater good?’ Then Sorkin gives you the positive, then the negative case and you constantly whipsaw between them. It’s just brilliant. He does it so elegantly.”

And what did Abrahams, as a creative executive, do, exactly?

“Buy scripts and then kill the idea slowly,” he quips.

“I get into fights on LinkedIn because there are a lot of people who are like: ‘AI’s going to take everyone’s jobs.’ I’m like: ‘That’s just not going to happen. That’s not a thing.’”

— Nick Abrahams

Returning to comedy is a natural progression in his career as an entertainer, professional speaker and lawyer. He thinks lawyers are often comedians because they’re smart and have a great sense of humour.

“They like a laugh. Lawyers generally are smart, but they won’t laugh easily. They’re not going to laugh at slapstick, necessarily. But if you can do something reasonably clever – wordplay works best for them.”

But then there’s his other focus: the future of AI, and what it means for companies, the workforce and future generations.

Between his work at Norton Rose Fulbright, Abrahams also co-founded LawPath, a company which uses AI to offer cheaper legal solutions for Australian businesses.

He’s also worked as an adjunct professor at Bond University, researching how AI can assist businesses, and created online courses through Bond that are designed to help people (in particular entry-level lawyers) learn how to use AI to be more productive, while also developing the leadership skills that technology can’t replace. Now he gives speeches on AI to lawyers, among others.

“I feel like I’ve seen a lot of technology trends that have hit, where people have said: ‘This time it’s different, it will completely change the world,’” he says.

“I get into fights on LinkedIn because there are a lot of people who are like: ‘AI’s going to take everyone’s jobs.’ I’m like: ‘That’s just not going to happen. That’s not a thing.’”

It will impact jobs like graphic design, he concedes. But a wholesale labour-force destruction? He doesn’t buy it.

“My belief is that we work in these very complex systems. To change things quickly because of the advance of technology doesn’t happen. I mean, we’ve been able to book travel online for 20 years and yet 30 per cent of travel in the US last year was booked using travel agents.”

The oysters have arrived. They’re delicious and at least twice the size of the average Sydney rock. Abrahams and I agree to look away as each attempts the task of eating a big oyster with elegance.

I admit my cynicism towards AI. As a writer and reader, the fact that many large-language models were trained on stolen work and continue to displace creative workers means I try to avoid it.

Abrahams doesn’t use AI to draft any of his written or speaking work, but does use it to generate images for his show. He’s unsure if a silver lining for the publishing industry exists, and agrees that cognitive surrender – the practice of simply accepting AI-output with little to no scrutiny – is a problem.

He references an American judge who sanctioned a lawyer in May after discovering AI-generated hallucinations in a personal injury case. French lawyer and researcher in law and data science Damien Charlotin has been compiling court documents containing AI errors since April 2023, and so far, has 1600 examples, according to the Agence France-Presse. Most are from the USA and Canada, but 74 are from Australian court documents.

“Those are just the errors that are found in the court documents,” says Abrahams. “You think of the errors that are happening everywhere else in the law firm… These are errors that exist because of cognitive surrender, because this stuff is so beguiling.

“Cognitive surrender will be one of the big risk issues, and it’s not just for law firms.”

He’s particularly worried about the future for young lawyers and the entry-level workforce at large. Not only are those roles at risk of being replaced by AI, if graduates do score those positions, cognitive surrender could impede their ability to actually develop the skills needed to progress.

The idea for The Accidental Lawyer came from the question: “What do graduates need to know to survive the future?” he says, and it crystallised when he was asked to give an address at the University of Wollongong in 2018.

“I thought, ‘What am I going to tell these folks?’ It wasn’t just law [that I pursued], it was a whole variety of other disciplines,” he says.

“[Your work career is] a series of events and you get lucky with some and others don’t work out, and you learn from that and move on.”

— Nick Abrahams

He followed his studio executive dream and it was fun for a while – the creatives in Hollywood tend to be great. But studio folk, on the other hand, can be difficult and in the 1990s, bullying (and worse) was endemic across Hollywood.

“I just formed my view that I didn’t want to raise my family there,” says Abraham. So, he walked away. He hasn’t regretted it, noting wryly that those who advise pursuing dreams are generally those who don’t manage to realise them.

For most people, he thinks happiness lies in finding the balance between a job that you can learn to love, while also paying the bills.

We’ve cleared our plates and it’s time for coffee and maybe dessert. Quo Vadis is known for its decadent profiteroles and meringues, but we’re both stuffed. Sensible coffee it is.

A few nights after we met, Abrahams performed in London with other gigs lined up in Australia and Tokyo.

“I’ve had the lion’s share of my career, so AI’s not an issue for me, but it is a massive issue for younger people. I’m hopeful that this show will give people an idea on how to [navigate it],” he says.

“I do worry about people coming into their careers, and the idea that they must have a certain type of career. For most people, that’s not the way that it works. There’s a series of events and you get lucky with some and others don’t work out, and you learn from that and move on.

“I think that’ll be the way with AI. I don’t think it’s the end of careers – there are great careers to be had.

“We’ve got to work out how to make it work and work with it. But overall, I’m optimistic.”

Nick Abrahams will perform The Accidental Lawyer at the Paddo Hotel in Brisbane on October 29 and 30 and The Comic’s Lounge in Melbourne on November 5 and The Comedy Store in Sydney on 27 November.