Advice from a Partner Who Has Watched This Pattern Before
Every generation of new lawyers has inherited a profession in motion. I know this because I was one of them once, handed a matter that required Shepardizing, the laborious process of confirming that every case you intended to cite was still good law, by hunting through thick burgundy and gold volumes arranged on shelves. You pulled the bound Shepard’s Citations for the relevant reporter, cross-referenced your case by volume and page number, then traced a web of subsequent history through notation symbols that took months to learn fluently. It was painstaking and methodical. Then Westlaw and Lexis arrived, and that entire world disappeared.
Word processors replaced the transcription pool. Voice dictation replaced the micro-cassette recorder. E-discovery platforms replaced warehouses of bankers boxes. Each time, the worry was that something essential was being lost. Each time, what was lost was the mechanical layer, and what remained was sharper, more interesting, and more genuinely legal. The pattern is familiar. The scale is not.
Our firm made a deliberate decision to get ahead of AI early, investing substantially across both client-facing practice and internal operations. The goal was never to replace lawyers. It was to put our people in a position to move faster, serve clients better, and grow into trusted advisers sooner. What we have seen bears that out.
Artificial intelligence is the largest version of this story I have witnessed. And if you are a new lawyer right now, you are standing at exactly the right moment.
If you are worried that losing the mechanical work means losing the training ground, I hear that. But apprenticeship has never really been defined by the mechanics of gathering information. It has always been defined by learning to evaluate it, challenge it, and turn it into advice a client can trust. AI accelerates that journey. It does not replace it.
The cite-checking, the manual document review, the regulatory cross-referencing that once consumed a first-year’s early years can now be done in a fraction of the time. Use that well. Get closer to the client, go one level deeper than the assignment asked for, and ask the question nobody else thought to put in the memo. That is where reputations get built, and all of it is available to you far earlier in your career than it was to any generation before you.
Don’t ignore the new practice area. AI and technology law is growing faster than most firms have fully reckoned with, and new lawyers are better positioned to own it than most senior partners ever will be. You understand this environment intuitively. The clients navigating data privacy, algorithmic liability, and AI governance are largely your generation. Get close to that work now, and you will find that your future clients are the people you are meeting today.
The noise right now is that this is a dangerous time to be starting out. I have heard that before, about every tool that turned out to be an opportunity. The mechanical floor of this profession is rising. What remains, judgment, relationships, and genuine counsel, is exactly what drew most of you here. That is why I believe this is the most exciting time to be a new lawyer.
This blog post is not offered, and should not be relied on, as legal advice. You should consult an attorney for advice in specific situations.