AI has entered the legal world, but rather than making lawyers lazier, it should force them to think harder, writes Alex Fortescue-Webb in today’s Notebook
AI doesn’t have to mean lazier lawyers
Last week the Law Society made it clear that lawyers remain accountable for how juniors use AI. The legal profession is concerned about indiscriminate AI use, understandably given the number of stories of hallucinations that have hit the headlines. A recent HEPI survey found that 94 per cent of undergrads are using AI for assessed work. So when those students become lawyers, they are already familiar with these tools, but how they use them is largely going unchecked.
Clearly, a lot has changed in the last four years. AI tools are now able to competently take on significant amounts of the routine work juniors used to cut their teeth on. That means two things: first, they will have the opportunity to consider strategic issues much earlier in their careers; second, the way they are trained, and their own self-development, will need to evolve.
The first is a huge positive – involvement in the substantive issues of a case, a transaction or indeed any piece of legal work is the reason many students decide to study law in the first place. Their ambitions will now be realised sooner, and their careers are likely to progress faster.
Good training can support this. AI is going to make training much more specific – available in real time or through highly detailed and tailored simulations. At the same time, junior lawyers should treat AI as a thinking partner rather than relying on it – pushing back on its outputs, interrogating reasoning, verifying key sources and, crucially, taking full responsibility for their work.
We also believe that it is going to be critical for future lawyers to start learning how to use AI as a complement to (rather than a replacement for) their own critical thinking – to support that, we’ve expanded our Legal AI Scholars Programme so that students can experiment with Legora while they study.
Linklaters is adopting AI rapidly
The photo was taken at Legal Tech Talk, where I sat down with Sarah Barnard from Linklaters. We talked the room through how Linklaters got lawyers using AI: almost 80 per cent of its partners now use Legora every month – one of the fastest partner adoption ramps either of us has seen. A big part of that was their approach of training a small group of 12 partners, getting them comfortable with the tech before they brought their colleagues up to speed.
Quote of the week
“Always assume positive intent”
Not sure where that came from but it can really change how you interact with people
Mathematical breakthrough
In September, around 10,000 AI agents working in parallel for 88 hours produced a proposed solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems set by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Mathematicians have worked on it for decades without success. The proof still needs independent verification, and the Clay Institute waits two years before considering any solution, but it’s a remarkable moment for mathematics that I’ll be following closely.
A book recommendation
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is the book I always recommend to people. Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, explains what the research tells us about sleep and how it affects almost every part of our health, from memory and learning to mood. It changed how much I prioritise sleep. In a profession where long hours and late nights are often worn as a badge of honour, it makes a convincing case that proper rest is one of the best things you can do for your work.
Alex Fortescue-Webb is head of UK at Legora