Dear Junior Lawyers: You'll Be Fine
But you must build your own AI systems and rethink what’s possible
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Dear Junior Associates:
When the telephone reached law offices, senior partners resisted. You couldn’t read a client’s face over the wire, they grumbled. Couldn’t build trust without being in the room. A real lawyer showed up in person.
When computers replaced the law library, partners worried associates wouldn’t learn to research. Flipping through case reporters built instinct, they instructed. A search engine built laziness.
When email replaced memos, someone, somewhere, mourned the death of careful composition.
I came up as a lawyer when mobile chat replaced email. I began to lawyer with my thumbs. Texting legal advice between meetings, on the train, from the couch. Sometimes I send gifs to clients.
Every generation of senior lawyers has looked at the next generation’s tools and seen the beginning of decline. Every time, the juniors turned out fine. Often better.
But you’d better step up.
One way to be a proactive junior lawyer
[Video: a fine-tuned AI system makes it effortless.]
Recently on a high-stakes deal, I asked you, a junior attorney, for a contract summary. You told me your workflow would get it to me “later.”
So I opened an AI tool and had it in four minutes. I sent it to you to triple-check. You flagged a few issues and revised.
What would an AI-native junior lawyer do?
A junior who’d built an AI workflow for contract summaries could have had it on my desk before I even asked. That junior would’ve fine-tuned it to the style and framing I like, based on our past work together.
It would’ve taken seconds to generate.
AI is not replacing legal judgment. AI is redefining what “proactive” means.
When I wrote about the AI skill stack, I used the metaphor that we direct AI the way we direct a junior associate. Here, the junior associates also need to raise their own skills.
A better future for lawyers
The worry I hear from other senior lawyers: if AI does the first draft, associates never learn to draft. The reps disappear. The training pipeline breaks.
I understand the concern. The traditional model was apprenticeship through suffering. Read every page, draft something bad, get redlined, study the redlines, repeat. The grunt work was the point.
Some of that genuinely taught things. Proofreading a 200-page credit agreement at 3 a.m. builds pain tolerance, attention to detail and a stubbornness about getting things right. Those matter.
But let’s be honest about the rest. The rest was formatting exhibit lists, manually cross-referencing defined terms and sitting in a conference room re-numbering sections (always at 3 a.m.) because a partner restructured the deal at the last minute.
That wasn’t training. That was a rite of passage dressed up as education.
The real question isn’t whether juniors lose the grunt work. It’s whether they get something better.
I think they do. The most patient tutor in history now lives on your laptop.
AI will explain a clause, walk through the doctrine, generate three drafts to critique, then argue the other side so it can pressure-test your position. It does this at 3 a.m. without complaint.
Yes, there are things AI can’t teach. It can’t show you what it feels like when opposing counsel goes quiet across the table. It won’t teach you when to call the reporter before the regulator because the narrative is the bigger fire. I built an AI demo around this idea.
Those instincts still come from reps with real people under real pressure.
AI means juniors can spend less time re-numbering exhibit lists and more time in the rooms where those instincts are built. More negotiations, more client calls, more time watching a partner read the room and learning how it’s done.
AI intuition is the instinct for directing thinking machines. Juniors will build it faster than any class of lawyers before them. Not because they’re smarter. Because their tools are.
What I expect
Every generation of senior lawyers feared the next would be lesser. Every generation was wrong.
You have better tools than any class of lawyers before you. The bar is higher because of it.
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