The AI associate: Reshaping the Training of Lawyers
After initial push back and criticism, law firms in Canada are finally instituting artificial intelligence (AI) in their offices in a significant way. For example, Torys, one of the largest law firms in Canada, has entered into a partnership with Harvey, a legal AI software, to drive firm-wide adoption at scale. There are many implications to this including professional responsibility, hourly billing policies and client expectations. There is also the constant refrain of artificial intelligence replacing lawyers outright, on which my position remains the same: it won’t as long as the lawyer actually provides value. This article will focus instead on the impact of implementing AI on the training of lawyers, especially students and those newly called to the bar. Now that AI is being integrated in the largest firms in Canada, this will necessarily impact students and newly called lawyers and shape the way they are trained.
Over the past several decades, articling placement students and junior lawyers were trained within firms in the practice of law by performing research, writing memos to senior partners or crafting basic documents from years of precedent. If they were lucky, they would sit in meetings and assist in lower-level tasks until they became senior enough to carry a file on their own. This would provide two functions: training for the junior lawyer to get them practical experience while at the same timeproviding support for the senior lawyers to assist in their billings. But what happens when a software can accomplish support for senior counsel quicker, cheaper andmore efficiently? When AI can provide a summary of laws with references for review or provide a nice first draft to a lawyer for review, all within seconds? At that point, there is very little for the junior to do beyond prompting the AI — the gap of knowledge at that point is too great. The junior won’t know if what the AI produces is correct, nor will this assist with any actual training. The supervising lawyer can simply input the prompts to the AI, review its output and cut out the middleman — the junior lawyer. For smaller firms or sole proprietorships, this might mean yet another reduction in demand for students and junior lawyers. This will be as a result of a general misunderstanding of the future of how a junior lawyer should be used and trained. What is required is a monumental shift in the attitudes of the legal industry in shaping a junior lawyer’s training. Here are some ideas that might help:
Technology and AI training. AI continues to develop and improve at an accelerated rate. Junior lawyers should be expected to attend software seminars and maintain a good understanding of what AI like Harvey or Claude can do for a law firm and what it cannot. While this doesn’t train lawyers in the practice of law, it does improve their understanding of technology and their ability to support supervising lawyers in bridging the gap between AI output and a lawyer’s review.
Client relationship and solution providers. Senior lawyers should use junior lawyers and students for client relations and marketing intake. Some of my best experience as an articling student came from taking initial client phone calls at a personal injury firm. It necessarily involved developing relationships with strangers over the phone, assessing their case by asking the right questions and giving them the comfort to provide truthful answers, and guiding them to the next steps to solve their issues either within the firm or referring them elsewhere. So far, AI has not been able to replace these personal relationships and customized problem-solving, and this is what an experienced lawyer should be able to do. This also gives junior lawyers business development training so clients will be retained while a supervising lawyer performs more complex work.
Presentations. Instead of relying on junior lawyers to produce PowerPoint presentations for a lawyer’s meeting or preparing a file for a client meeting, supervising lawyers should allow junior lawyers to conduct meetings themselves under observation and only jump in to fix mistakes. Presenting solutions and strategy to clients in a manner they understand is a crucial skill that lawyers only obtain with practice. After enough time, the repetition of presentations will allow supervising lawyers to attend another meeting and leave a junior lawyer to conduct a lower-stakes meeting by themselves.
Active analysis of AI documents. Senior lawyers should be teaching junior lawyers what to watch out for in AI documents: how to conduct a high-level review, spot hallucinations and amend it to properly reflect the customized solution provided for in the meetings between lawyer and client. This will take a bit more time from the senior lawyer, but this will allow the junior lawyer to understand exactly what they are producing. Junior lawyers still need to learn the basics of arithmetic before doing math with a calculator.
I will always maintain that a properly trained lawyer who provides solutions to a customer will never be replaced by AI. To that end, I will conclude this article with a quote from the introduction of our AI policy manual at Bluestar Professional Services: AI allows us to separate the tasks of our jobs from the purpose of it. Our purpose is to help people. Our tasks — drafting contracts, financial plan creation, tax returns and so forth — are not the job.
Training younger professionals to ensure they understand their purpose — of service, solutions, to help people solve problems — and practice with real-life experience should be the natural consequence of the implementation of AI in the law.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc. at this link:
https://www.law360.ca/ca/pulse/articles/2467280/the-ai-associate-reshaping-the-training-of-lawyers