I thought a partner at a mid-sized firm was kidding when he first told me that his junior associates had stopped reading contracts. He wasn’t. He expressed it in a somewhat melancholy and largely dejected manner, similar to how someone might say that their children no longer write in cursive. Of course, the contracts are still read. Simply put, not by people anymore—at least not during the initial pass. A 26-year-old who is expected to know what to do with them receives the results after a model reads them, highlights any odd clauses, and translates the foreign-language passages into something understandable. One of the decade’s most subtly significant questions is whether she really does.
The International Bar Association, which describes AI as a shift from emerging concern to operational reality, saw the change so clearly that it listed it as a critical issue in its Legal Agenda for the year. That’s bureaucrat jargon for something more awkward. In the past, a young lawyer’s first three years were spent on tasks like document review, contract triage, and multilingual due diligence. Not coincidentally, they also taught that lawyer how to think like a lawyer. The apprenticeship is eliminated when the grunt work is eliminated. Few older partners are able to pinpoint exactly what they feel is being hollowed out.
The paradigm is shifting, according to Sönke Lund, who chaired one of the IBA’s working groups on the profession. He claims that he had to deal with documents when he first began practicing. He needed to review them, analyze them, and spend enough time with them to develop instinct. AI is now responsible for the task. Due in part to the fact that the new technology creates a plethora of new legal issues of its own, Lund continues to see a bright future for attorneys. The fact that the profession is still in existence because its replacement continues to generate employment for it is somewhat ironic.
This round is unique because of the bilingual piece. The moat used to be translation. Spanish-speaking colleagues, sworn translators, and hours of cross-checking were required by a New Delhi partner negotiating with a Madrid firm. Pranav Srivastava, a partner at Phoenix Legal and co-vice chair of the IBA’s Young Lawyers’ Committee, has seen that moat evaporate in real time.
He continues to adamantly maintain that AI is only as good as the attorney utilizing it. When you consider that lawyers are now competing with a tool that drafts in twelve languages before breakfast, the line takes on a slightly different meaning. He contends that prompt drafting will develop into a competency on par with legal drafting. Perhaps. It’s still unclear if it will be taught effectively in law schools or if it will become one of those things that everyone is implicitly expected to know, like Excel modeling in finance.
Junior associates gossip about which US Big Law firms covertly prohibit AI for first-year students outside a coffee shop close to one I won’t name. At least one such instance has been verified by Paul Paton, a professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law: a firm that has its own proprietary tools but keeps them from juniors so partners can still evaluate raw ability. The logic is sound, almost poignant. According to Paton, doing due diligence has never been a young lawyer’s passion project, but it develops the skills needed to eventually become the senior provider. A generation of lawyers who can oversee machines without ever having performed the tasks the machines replaced will result from skipping the muscle-building.
Not everyone has the same level of concern. The rector of Kazimieras Simonavňius University, Dr. Jolanta Bieliauskaitė, argues that legal errors are painful and expensive and that a machine, even if it is bilingual, cannot consider the moral and social aspects of a real case. Most likely, she is correct. It’s difficult to ignore the painful, expensive errors that have already begun, even as courts in three different countries struggle with fake citations created by chatbots and submitted by attorneys who neglected to verify. The occupation won’t disappear. It will narrow at the bottom, widen oddly at the top, and leave a generation of lawyers learning a craft in which software that is currently still free has quietly taken over the majority of the fundamental rituals.
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