The making of a modern litigator, part five

This brings us full circle. In the first of these articles, a friend asked whether his daughter should study law. My answer was yes. It still is--and now I will go further. The future of litigation has never looked more enjoyable, and the young lawyer walking through the door today has the best seat in the house.

Of all the stages of a legal career, AI is going to transform the first few years the most. Senior litigators have always had a team behind them, so for them the machine is one more very capable member of the cast; their daily routine will not change dramatically. It is the young lawyers whose world is about to be remade--and remade for the better.

When I started in 1999, a first-year associate's natural habitat was a room lined with bankers' boxes and stocked with a highlighter that ran dry before lunch. We reviewed documents one by one, by hand, much as our ancestors gathered berries. I am forever grateful that my mentors rescued me early by exposing me to (what was at the time) the royal jelly: drafting letter briefs for a magistrate and writing interview memos. But some associates were expected to spend two or three years in the wilderness before being trusted with anything more exciting than document review. Those days are ending, and I will not pretend to mourn them.

Nor will the young associate have to live in dread of the red pen. For decades, the rite of passage was submitting your first brief and getting it back so thoroughly marked up it resembled a crime scene. AI now helps with the stylistic polish and a good deal of the research, which spares the partner the sea of reading that used to follow every junior draft--and spares the junior the heart attack. The result is that a first-year associate now has, in effect, a trusted coach sitting at their elbow to help with legal argument, drafting and formatting from the very first day.

That changes what a young lawyer's practice looks like. The quaint notion that a litigator should be kept away from taking depositions for the first three, four or five years--lest they alarm the witness, opposing counsel or themselves--should become a relic. The tools now at our disposal let young litigators jump in early and build the foundational skills of the trade far sooner, precisely because so much of the old drudgery has been handed off to the machine.

Now you may ask: don't they still need to learn the old-fashioned way--watching, observing, carrying the senior partner's bag for a few years before taking a real crack at oral argument, a deposition or a trial? Well, yes and no. They still need to be taught. But here is another advantage of AI that nobody saw coming: a young lawyer can now have a virtual coach for the foundational skills, and--whisper it--may sometimes get better instruction from it than from whichever lawyer at the firm happened to be free that afternoon. These coaches can work in video, even in an interactive format, letting an associate sharpen their skills at two in the morning, from a tool that is endlessly patient, never sighs and does not bill them for the privilege.

None of this means mentorship disappears. That would be a genuine loss. But let us be honest about the status quo: A junior associate today often has nowhere to turn for coaching except the internal team, and that is not always the best classroom, because the lawyers higher up the chain are forever buried in the urgent matter of the moment. AI fills the gap that mentorship, through no one's fault, has often left incomplete.

So AI is going to be transformative for the young litigator in three ways in particular:

First, it provides a tireless, trusted team for document review and coding--the work that used to consume those first years almost entirely.

Second, it dramatically streamlines the tasks at the heart of the craft: the writing of pleadings, briefs and motions.

Third, it offers on-demand training and mentoring to associates who need a pointer on almost anything--from what belongs in an expert declaration to what questions to ask a class plaintiff--without having to wait for a partner to surface from a deadline.

Yes, in some ways it is a little sad that certain lessons may no longer pass directly from mentor to mentee the way they did just a few years ago. But those relationships can still flourish. An associate with an extra coach on the side is not a threat to mentorship; it is a relief valve for it, filling the gaps when the mentors are tied up--which, if we are honest, is most of the time.

So here is where five articles have brought us: The litigators are not going extinct. The courthouse is bracing for a flood. The billable hour, hated as ever, keeps showing up to work. And the young lawyer--the one whose father once worried she had chosen a dying profession--is about to enjoy a more varied practice, with more help at her side and the chance to do real, high-level work years earlier than any of us did. Tell her to apply. The future has never looked better and it will belong to her.

This is the fifth and final article on what artificial intelligence will do to the practice of law. To read parts one through four, please click here.