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AI
What law schools must do
Law schools can no longer treat practical formation as someone else’ s problem. That means honestly acknowledging the judgment gap and investing seriously in the simulations, clinics, and live client work that can recreate some of the conditions apprenticeship once provided. It means building business literacy into the curriculum as a core competency. And it means evolving teaching methods, including business-school-style cases, cross-disciplinary problem sets, and environments that force students to make decisions rather than just analyze appellate reasoning.
As Michele DeStefano has argued, the goal should be to train people to think like lawyers, behave like business professionals, and be innovators. The schools that succeed will be those that assume greater responsibility for the full formation of lawyers.
The role clients must play
Clients were instrumental in dismantling the old model. Their unwillingness to subsidize junior training is understandable but short-sighted. The talent they are refusing to fund today is the talent they will desperately need tomorrow.
There are practical ways to act on that interest. Embedding junior lawyers in-house as part of deliberate development programs. Co-funding training through industry bodies. Partnering with law schools on curriculum design and clinics. Firms and law schools cannot do this alone. Clients who benefit most from excellent legal judgment have both the means and the motivation to help.
What leaders must do now
The challenge is not only about the next generation but also about the people currently working.
As the traditional conditions for cultivating judgment erode, firms must construct new ones. That might mean giving lawyers meaningful responsibility earlier, rather than reserving complexity for more senior colleagues. Here,
AI offers something unexpected: a partial answer to the problem it has helped bring about. Junior lawyers equipped with the right tools can research, draft, and analyze at a level that once required significant experience. The task for leaders is to harness that capability to accelerate development.
It also means investing in new skills such as business literacy, cross-functional collaboration, and strategic thinking. None of this is cheap. But the cost of underinvestment will eventually show up, and by then it will be difficult to close.
The window is open
The lawyer of 2030 will still need to know the law. But that is increasingly table stakes. Judgment is the prize that cannot be downloaded or automated. It must be deliberately built. The profession is losing the mechanism through which it traditionally did so, at a moment when it matters more than ever.
The legal ecosystem must urgently redesign for judgment and new skills. The longer the profession waits, the harder that becomes. ■
This article draws on Bjarne P. Tellmann’ s new book Law in the Era of AI: Clients, Firms, and the Future of the Legal Industry( Wiley, 2026).
Bjarne P. Tellmann www. fjordstreamadvisors. com
Bjarne P. Tellmann is CEO of FjordStream Advisors GmbH and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. He previously served as Founding General Counsel and Executive Committee member at Haleon plc( FTSE 20), and as Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel at Pearson plc( FTSE 100). He is the author of Building an Outstanding Legal Team( Globe Law and Business, 2017) and he speaks and teaches regularly at numerous academic institutions, including Harvard and the London School of Economics, as well as at leading global conferences and executive leadership forums. His honors include General Counsel of the Year at the British Legal Awards, the Burton Award for Legends in the Law, and inclusion in the Chambers GC Influencers Global 100. www. fjordstreamadvisors. com
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