Will AI Take Away Your Career Before It Begins?
When I was a junior lawyer, my early years were filled with late nights writing research memos, summarising cases and drafting contract clauses, only to have them returned covered in red ink.
I tried, often unsuccessfully, to emulate the style and logic of my supervising partner. It was frustrating, repetitive and humbling. But that was how I learned, through trial and error, revision and repetition. It was not glamorous, but it was foundational. Through that process, I began to develop judgment, structure arguments and understand what made legal writing effective.
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) can perform many of those same tasks with impressive speed and coherence. Generative AI tools can summarise judgments, prepare research notes, and even draft contracts or letters of advice in minutes. Many legal teams and firms are embracing these tools for their efficiency and rightly so.
But for young lawyers, the rapid adoption of AI brings a worrying consequence: the risk of losing the space to learn.
The Fast-Disappearing “Ground Floor”
Law has always been taught through an apprenticeship model. Junior lawyers are typically assigned low-risk, often repetitive tasks, not because they are unimportant, but because they serve as a crucial training ground.
It is through doing, redrafting and receiving feedback that we gradually learn to reason, structure arguments and develop sound legal judgment.
Much of the foundational work can now be done by AI. For senior lawyers and clients, it is a gain. However, for juniors, it may be a missing step. If there is no ground floor, where does the ladder begin?
If AI tools can now handle many of the tasks once assigned to junior lawyers, what is left for them to do?
More importantly, how will they learn to assess, challenge and improve upon AI-generated outputs without first developing their own judgment?
To make matters worse, some organisations are replacing not just the tasks but the training. Juniors may be asked to review AI-generated work or tweak prompts, but that does not teach them how to think like lawyers.
If you never struggle to articulate and structure an argument yourself, how will you recognise when the machine gets it wrong?
It is not AI replacing lawyers we should fear, but what happens when it accelerates past the slow, essential process of learning, leaving young lawyers under-equipped for real practice.
Prompting is Not Legal Practice
Much has been said about the importance of “learning to prompt”, crafting instructions that yield better AI responses. This is a useful skill. But prompting is not legal practice.
The essence of lawyering lies in judgment, spotting nuances, identifying gaps, weighing risks and tailoring advice to context.
A well-worded prompt may generate an elegant answer, but only a trained lawyer can evaluate whether that answer is sound.
That kind of judgment comes only from doing the work yourself, drafting, revising, failing and trying again. It is built through exposure to complexity, contradiction and feedback. There is no shortcut to instinct.
If we treat AI as a replacement rather than a co-pilot, we may deprive young lawyers of the chance to cultivate those critical faculties.
Rebuilding Ground-Level Training
Without deliberate intervention, AI risks creating a developmental gap between lawyers trained before and after its widespread adoption. AI will not eliminate lawyers, but it will erode the foundations of legal training.
To prevent this, law firms and legal departments need to consciously preserve space for learning and consider the following:
Preserve first-draft opportunities
Encourage juniors to attempt the first draft of memos, advice or clauses before turning to AI. Struggling through the problem builds understanding and reveals what they do not yet know.
Emphasise critical review
Training must include how to assess AI-generated output. Can the junior spot legal inaccuracies, poor logic or contextual mismatch?
Maintain feedback loops
Feedback, whether from supervisors or peers, remains vital. AI may speed up production, but only human mentors can speed up learning.
Balance efficiency with exposure
Senior lawyers must be mindful not to delegate all the initial drafting or analysis to AI. Sometimes, junior lawyers need the opportunity to learn things the “long and wrong way”.
What Can a Junior Lawyer Do?
If you are just starting out, AI does not make you obsolete but it changes the way you learn. Here are a few principles to keep in mind:
Draft first, then compare
Write the note or draft the clause yourself before using AI. Compare the outputs. Where do they differ? Why? This sharpens your thinking.
Seek feedback on your thinking
Do not rely solely on AI. Ask supervisors to review your original work. Understanding why your analysis differs is how you grow.
Focus on reasoning, not just answers
Always ask: Does this make sense? What is the legal basis? Are there risks? The goal is not a good-looking answer but a sound one.
Stay curious
Read judgments. Study well-drafted documents. Ask why things are phrased a certain way. AI is a tool, but you are the one developing judgment.
A Shared Responsibility
Law firms and legal departments must be deliberate in how they adopt AI. In the pursuit of efficiency, long-term talent development must not be neglected. If we automate every step, we should not be surprised when no one learns how to take them.
The benefits of AI should not come at the cost of professional development. If junior lawyers are hired to prompt or review AI-generated output, they must also be given the space to think critically, write in their own voice and learn through feedback and mentorship.
The legal profession is not built on information alone. It is built on judgment. While AI can assist, it cannot replace the slow, deliberate cultivation of legal instinct.
Final Thoughts
To all junior lawyers, this is still your journey. AI may assist, but the responsibility to interpret, question and reason remains yours. The profession will always need people who know how to ask the right questions and know when the answer is wrong.
Yes, the world is changing. But your skills still matter. In fact, they matter more than ever. Because someone must keep the machine honest.
