DOWNTO BUSINESS
DOWNTO BUSINESS
AI AND THE LEGAL PROFESSION: What Happens When Apprenticeship Dies?
By Douglas J. Wood
Much of the writing about artificial intelligence and the law has focused on efficiency: faster research, quicker drafting, cheaper document review, and the now-familiar warnings about hallucinated cases and fake citations. Those concerns are real and deserve mention.
But they do not address the most profound question: What will AI do to the lives of those entering the legal profession and to the structure of the profession itself?
Law has always been an apprenticeship business. Law school teaches doctrine, analysis, and a way of thinking. It does not teach someone how to practice law. Young lawyers learn by doing the unglamorous work of reviewing documents, checking citations, summarizing depositions, organizing facts, sitting in on calls, and watching senior lawyers exercise judgment. Over time, they absorb what matters and why.
The problem is that many of those entry-level tasks are precisely the ones AI now performs.
What happens when the traditional work of trainees, junior associates, interns, court clerks, and paralegals is reduced? Or eliminated? The International Bar Association has warned that
26 The Trial Lawyer