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| Murray Gottheil |
When the work started flowing in again, we realized that what we needed was a real estate associate with about five years of experience. So, we called a recruiter and told her who to look for. When she finished laughing, she asked, “You do realize that no one has trained a junior real estate lawyer in the last five years, don’t you?”
Let’s fast-forward to 2026. We are all jumping on the AI bandwagon. If things unfold in the manner the AI providers are threatening they will, we will no longer see young lawyers being trained to do the low-level tasks they presently do.
The thing about those low-level tasks is that they often form the basis for understanding higher-level tasks.
When I was a new lawyer, eons ago, I learned how to practise law by practising. I researched cases. I reviewed precedents. I read articles. I wrote letters and memos. Then I drafted simple documents, constructing a document from various precedents. Eventually, I drafted complicated documents. The process of doing all this stuff drilled the concepts into my brain.
Now our new lawyers will do many of these things by providing a prompt to AI and then editing the output. Will doing that result in the same depth of knowledge I developed doing things the hard way? I have my doubts.
A friend of mine teaches at a university. Just this week, he wrote me and said, “Results from the final exam were very disappointing. I suspect there is a direct correlation between reliance on AI and student performance. Most students are not reading and analyzing the materials. They use AI as a crutch and then find they can’t recall even basic principles and rules.”
Anecdotal as it is, this makes sense to me. Back when I was in school, I found the exercise of writing and then rewriting and synthesizing my notes was invaluable in helping me understand and integrate concepts. Had I taken notes with AI and then just read them, I doubt I would have excelled at law school (which I did, and I like to mention it because that was my professional peak).
If we do not train people properly, where are we going to find properly trained people? Five years from now, when we want to hire lawyers with a sound foundation in the basic concepts that are required to practise law effectively, will the only people available be adept at writing prompts and little else?
I am not an expert in education. I don’t know if the answer is to ban new lawyers from using AI for the first five years of practice or to develop new training programs driven by AI to teach them basic concepts. But I am quite sure turning them loose to rely on AI without a plan is going to end badly.
Murray Gottheil is a retired lawyer living in the country, happy and driving a pickup truck. Reach him at murray@murraygottheil.com and see what he is up to at www.lawanddisorderinc.com.
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