The Training Myth: Why AI Will Make Better Lawyers
How technology is reshaping legal education and the path to partnership.
The Anxiety
Law firms worry that artificial intelligence will rob junior lawyers of their education. If machines review contracts or draft diligence reports, what is left for trainees? How will they acquire the experience needed to become partners?
The concern is understandable. The profession has long been structured as an apprenticeship. Partners pass down knowledge by assigning repetitive tasks to juniors. Remove the grind and, many fear, the ladder collapses.
The Historical Model
This anxiety rests on a belief that grunt work is formative. For decades, firms used repetition as training. Drafting the same clause hundreds of times was meant to sharpen instincts. Reviewing diligence binders was thought to build judgment about risk.
In practice, much of this “education” was illusory. The assumption was that if a junior associate stayed up until 3am compiling a closing binder, they were learning. The expectation was that they would read those binders and absorb wisdom through osmosis. But even if associates did read them - and I can guarantee that almost none did - were they truly understanding what they saw? The system often rewarded endurance, not comprehension.
Many associates advanced not by learning but by surviving. Long hours, fear of mistakes, and reluctance to ask questions created a system where confidence often mattered more than competence.
The Reality
AI exposes the weakness in this model. A junior who is unsure about a disclosure requirement or an obscure filing no longer has to choose between silence and embarrassment. They can ask the system first. Unlike a partner, the system is never too busy. Unlike colleagues, it is never grumpy because a client has just sent a sharp email. It responds instantly and in confidence.
This does not make partners irrelevant. It makes their input more valuable. Associates who consult AI first arrive at partner discussions with sharper, more focused questions. Instead of spending time explaining basic terms, partners can concentrate on higher-order skills: risk judgment, regulatory nuance, and negotiation strategy.
The Economics of Attention
There is also an economic dimension. Every minute a partner spends explaining a clause is a minute of billable time forgone. Not all partners think this way. Some are patient mentors, generous with their time. But the structure of law firms does not reward pedagogy. AI offers a way to square the circle: juniors can ask unlimited questions without reducing revenue, and partners can step in where their insight has the highest return.
The Shift
This transforms training in three ways.
From production to judgment. Machines will draft. Juniors will evaluate.
From scarcity to abundance. Knowledge is no longer rationed by partner availability.
From personal to institutional memory. Expertise is stored in systems, not just in the heads of individual lawyers.
Law School and Beyond
The implications go beyond law firms. Law schools, too, will need to adapt. Instead of teaching only how to “find the answer,” they will teach how to interrogate AI outputs, spot errors, and test assumptions. Continuing education will change as well. Today, many mid-career lawyers rely on sporadic CLE courses. Tomorrow, ongoing education may be embedded directly into the tools they use daily, prompting them to refine their knowledge as they work.
The Risk
The real danger is not that juniors will learn too little, but that firms will fail to redesign training. If they cling to the belief that only grunt work builds competence, they will produce a generation stranded between machines that do the work and partners who no longer bother to teach.
The Future
By 2030, the best-trained lawyers may be those who grew up with AI. They will have asked more questions, tested more scenarios, and engaged more directly with substantive law than any previous cohort. The firms that embrace this shift will produce lawyers who are both faster and smarter.
The myth is that painful repetition makes great lawyers. The reality is that access to knowledge does. AI will not erode legal education. It will improve it.