AI is reshaping legal practice, but its deeper impact may be on lawyer development, forcing leaders to redesign how expertise, judgment, and client-centered excellence are built
Key insights:
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AI is changing how lawyers develop judgment and expertise — As AI takes over more legal tasks, firms must ensure that lawyers still gain the experience, reasoning skills, and confidence needed to become excellent practitioners.
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Law firm leaders must redesign training for an AI-enabled profession — Beyond adopting AI, law firms need intentional systems for mentorship, feedback, workflow, and evaluation so AI supports lawyer development instead of weakening it.
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The best firms will use AI to build better lawyers, not just faster work — Long-term success will depend on whether firms use AI to strengthen human judgment, critical thinking, and client service, rather than replacing them.
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For law firms looking to deliver greater value, AI taps into an obvious opportunity to enhance efficiency, accelerate work product delivery, and reduce expenses. With clients as our guiding North Star — shaping our decisions and defining our purpose — this is an opportunity that we enthusiastically embrace.
It is tempting, however, to focus only on how AI is changing the way lawyers deliver legal services as legal teams today publicize their deployment of AI tools and track utilization rates. However, firm leaders also need to ask more fundamental questions: How is AI changing the way attorneys learn? Are the assumptions that we have historically made about how we gained expertise and judgment still accurate, or were we conflating causation with correlation? Fundamentally, what does it mean to be a great lawyer, and how will law firms like ours continue to create great lawyers?
A new model for learning
Law firm leaders are facing a far deeper challenge than driving efficiency through technological adoption. We are now tasked with reimagining the very systems that produce excellent, client-centered attorneys in an environment in which many traditional development pathways are being transformed.
The core apprenticeship model for lawyer development has existed for thousands of years. The case method of formal legal education — created around 1869 by Harvard Law School Prof. Christopher Langdell — is a relatively newer phenomenon, but it is hardly new. Roughly six generations of lawyers in the United States have been on the receiving end of the same basic inputs: Case-based instruction followed by apprenticeship, grounded in repetition and increasing complexity over time.
It is tempting, however, to focus only on how AI is changing the way lawyers deliver legal services. However, firm leaders also need to ask more fundamental questions.
We reasonably assume that this is how one learns to think like a lawyer — and how we move talented junior lawyers from 1Ls to senior, expert practitioners. The prevailing belief is that lawyers can only learn judgment by muscling through thousands of genuine problems and through the friction that comes from making and fixing mistakes. Yet, these beliefs are largely inferential. We know how we were educated and how we practice, and we know what resulted. We have evidence about the conditions under which expertise developed, but not definitive proof of causation.
With the advent of AI, truly understanding how we make exceptional lawyers matters enormously. Much of the time-consuming work associated with lawyer development can now be completed, or at least materially assisted, by various AI tools. If these tasks were simply an inefficient use of our time, then nothing much is lost. However, if those efforts were integral to developing legal judgment, then their disappearance creates the real risk that we are weakening the very capabilities upon which our profession depends.
We are, in other words, interfering with a developmental system without understanding which component parts are essential to retain.
Leadership in an AI age
That shift reframes the role of leadership. Leaders cannot simply roll out AI tools and tout productivity gains — to do so risks losing essential developmental opportunities to gain judgment and expertise and produces lawyers that are little more than a set of hands for AI systems. Yet, ignoring the extraordinary capabilities of AI is not an option, either. Instead, leaders must become systems design architects, structuring legal work, training, and feedback in ways that preserve the conditions most likely to produce exceptional, client-centered lawyers.
To do this, leaders will need to design workflows in which AI supplements but does not replace effortful thinking, creates opportunities for reflection and feedback, and ensures that lawyers remain active participants in reasoning rather than passive editors of machine-generated output. All the while, law firm leaders also must create environments of trust and connection, without which great legal teams cannot be built.
Clearly, AI introduces both risks and opportunities into our historical education and development models. Beautifully crafted AI work product can create the illusion of competence but may create scenarios in which lawyers fail to grasp fully the underlying reasoning. Over time, this can lead to cognitive offloading and shallow understanding.
If attorneys rely excessively on AI tools, they risk becoming mere managers of AI-generated outputs. Unless human expertise and judgment are fully integrated with the AI tools, those outputs run the risk of being homogenized. AI can also create fear for the future, a condition under which it is nearly impossible to learn, and which would reduce human engagement from which essential observational learning occurs. Without internalizing knowledge and gaining genuine expertise, future lawyers may never learn the fundamental judgment needed to solve clients’ most complex problems.
At the same time, AI deployed well can become an exceptional developmental partner. AI can play devil’s advocate, create mock negotiation simulations, identify examples created by the profession’s greatest advocates, and offer access to data sets far too large for human review. Well-trained, bespoke AI tools can also supply immediate, tailored feedback on work product — something universally seen as essential to growth but too often in short supply.
We may learn that expertise can be developed with AI-enabled tools far faster than our traditional model has suggested, given that few legal work environments have ever been able to provide feedback with the speed and frequency that AI could supply.
Indeed, we may learn that expertise can be developed with AI-enabled tools far faster than our traditional model has suggested, given that few legal work environments have ever been able to provide feedback with the speed and frequency that AI could supply. AI should be able to expand access to guidance previously limited by time, ego, and hierarchy, effectively supplementing traditional mentorship structures.
These tensions point to a central conclusion: Leaders, and not AI alone, will determine the future of the legal profession. Strong leaders will engage deeply with the question of how we create great lawyers, critically examining what human experiences are essential to gaining expertise, creativity, passion, and judgment. They will simultaneously challenge the notion that how the last six generations learned is the only way to learn, using AI as a catalyst for reconsidering how we can become even better at our craft.
The new rules of professional growth
Some design elements already seem essential. First, legal work should be performed in a manner that preserves active, deep thinking. This may impact the sequencing of when and how AI is used, and whether AI serves as a reviewer or a starting point. Second, legal education and development should emphasize the importance of critical thinking, of understanding the questions to be answered, the rule of law, and the meaning of justice. Indeed, attorneys should be judged on their work quality, not just quantity, with emphasis on sound judgment and nuanced, client-centered advice. Because you get what you measure, evaluation and compensation systems should overtly take expertise, creativity, and deep analytical skills into account.
Third, legal teams should be purposeful about developing the most human of skills — connectivity, trustworthiness, integrity, and resilience. This inevitably means spending time with other people, not just machines. Finally, organizations must maintain robust feedback loops, ensuring that human mentorship remains central even as AI tools become more prevalent.
At its core, this is a question of professional identity. The goal is not simply to produce lawyers who can use AI to deliver passable work products, but to develop lawyers whose judgment, adaptability, and commitment to client service are enhanced by new capabilities. AI has the potential to elevate the profession by enabling deeper analysis, access to greater knowledge, and more efficient, responsive service.
Law firm leaders can determine which of these futures emerge in their organizations. The pace of change is breathtaking, requiring us to move at light speed while answering truly fundamental questions. Leaders must embrace AI with optimism, but not uncritically, and build systems in which AI serves as a tool for learning and growth rather than a substitute for human development.
In the age of AI, we can continue to think like lawyers and be even better ones.
You can find out more about the challenges law firms face with managing their legal talent here
