The increasing sophistication of AI, particularly "agentic AI," presents both a risk of diminished critical thinking due to cognitive offloading and an opportunity to enhance critical thinking in the legal profession through intelligent design and application
Key insights:
-
-
-
Cognitive offloading is a significant risk — The correlation between increased AI usage and decreased critical thinking, known as cognitive offloading, poses a threat to effective legal practice, especially with the rise of autonomous agentic AI.
-
Agentic AI risks and opportunities — The next generation of agentic AI poses significant challenges to lawyers’ critical thinking skills, but it also offers opportunities for lawyers to enhance their analytical rigor and human insight.
-
Agentic AI can enhance critical thinking when properly leveraged — When designed by lawyers, for lawyers and used to augment human judgment in legal workflow tasks — such as discovery, contract analysis, and drafting — agentic AI can improve efficiency, deepen analysis, and allow legal professionals to focus on higher-value critical thinking tasks.
-
-
The legal profession is at a critical juncture as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated. Recent research has uncovered a troubling correlation between the use of AI and the decline in critical thinking abilities among legal professionals. This phenomenon, known as cognitive offloading, threatens the very foundation of effective legal practice.
Studies have shown a clear pattern linking AI use, cognitive offloading, and critical thinking. According to research by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School, there is a notable correlation between increased AI usage and diminished critical thinking performance among individuals. Moreover, as people offload more mental work to AI tools, their critical thinking scores tend to be lower. While correlation does not necessarily imply causation, this pattern is strong enough to warrant proactive measures to safeguard critical thinking skills.
The findings from the study have implications for lawyers. First, it is essential to design workflows that ensure attorneys retain ownership of problem framing, authority weighting, and strategic judgment. Human checkpoints should be inserted at key decisions, and transparent evidence trails should be maintained. For junior lawyers, it is crucial to preserve desirable difficulty reps — basically, the baseline skill-building experience — before they consult AI. By pairing these guardrails with outcome tracking, law firms can harness AI’s speed and scale while minimizing the risks associated with cognitive offloading.
Risks increase with agentic AI
The next wave of AI-powered legal tech involves agentic AI, which operates as autonomous agents. These agents can plan and execute complex workflows independently, make real-time decisions, and adapt strategies without constant human input. This autonomy intensifies cognitive offloading risks by enabling workflow automation beyond human oversight, strategic cognitive offloading, and the black box problem magnified. (Basically, these are situations in which a system’s internal workings are hidden, and users may know what goes in and what comes out, but not how the system arrives at its decisions.)
To mitigate the risks associated with cognitive offloading, legal professionals can leverage agentic AI tools designed to enhance critical thinking.
The autonomous nature of agentic AI creates unprecedented professional responsibility challenges, including supervision standards, competence requirements, and explaining AI-developed strategies to clients. The legal profession faces significant challenges that could accelerate skills atrophy, such as new attorneys missing opportunities to develop foundational analytical skills, lawyers becoming dependent on AI, and AI handling strategic planning.
To mitigate the risks associated with cognitive offloading, legal professionals can leverage agentic AI tools designed to enhance critical thinking. For instance, AI-driven legal research and analysis platforms can make every step of the legal workflow more transparent, testable, and adversarially robust. These tools use custom-trained, agentic AI to produce transparent, step-by-step research notes and comprehensive reports that present arguments on both sides.
Illuminating examples of critical thinking skills
Agentic AI is transforming legal practice by enhancing critical thinking skills through various applications, and these innovative uses of AI not only improve efficiency but also augment human judgment. This in turn enables lawyers to focus on higher-value tasks that require critical thinking, creativity, and nuanced understanding. Several examples illustrate how agentic AI can enhance critical thinking in legal practice, such as:
-
-
- Discovery — Autonomous analysis engines have uncovered patterns that traditional keyword searches missed. In one commercial litigation case, an agent found subtle shifts in executive language precisely around the period of alleged misconduct. The agent was able to explain why those patterns mattered and then tied each inference to source documents.
- Contract analysis — In M&A diligence, agentic AI examined hundreds of legacy agreements and flagged indemnification variants that created potential exposure issues. With about 94% accuracy, transparent AI reasoning supported a targeted remediation strategy that averted post-closing liability.
- Drafting workflows — Expert-designed, multi-step workflows assemble relevant know-how, generate first drafts to specification, and require counterarguments and verification before stylistic polish is done. This approach has been shown to reduce review time by roughly 63% and legal know-how tasks by about 10%.
-
As we are learning, agentic AI strengthens core litigation work by preserving human judgment while expanding pattern detection, accelerating theory testing, and deepening client advocacy. By handling comprehensive case law analysis and factual pattern identification, agentic AI frees litigators to develop creative legal theories, anticipate opposing strategies, and craft nuanced arguments.
Thus, to better elevate critical thinking in legal work, it is essential to use AI that is designed by lawyers, for lawyers. Domain-specific AI legal assistants provide nuanced insights that inform sharper, more strategic decisions. And expert-guided analytical workflows support comprehensive analysis without encroaching on professional judgment, ensuring that attorneys can interrogate sources confidently and build arguments on solid ground.
By embracing agentic AI as a collaborative counterpart, legal professionals can heighten analytical rigor and human insight — the very qualities that make legal practice both powerful and purposeful. As opportunities expand, so does the potential for creating more positive impact for clients, engaging in complex problem-solving, and advancing access to justice for more people.
You can find out more about the impact of AI and other advanced technologies on the legal profession here
