Is AI eroding the legal apprenticeship?

Law has long relied on an informal apprenticeship model, where early career lawyers learn through drafting, research and document review. But as firms increasingly adopt AI tools to automate the tasks that have historically trained juniors, there are growing concerns that the traditional ‘learn by doing’ pathway is starting to disappear.

While proponents say AI improves efficiency and frees juniors from repetitive work, others worry critical training opportunities are being lost. If junior lawyers no longer do the grunt work, how will they develop the judgement and technical skills needed to become capable and effective lawyers?

What’s emerging, however, is not the disappearance of junior lawyer work, but its transformation, as AI reshapes the tasks that once defined legal training. This is driving a shift in the nature of the legal apprenticeship, as the profession begins to confront the reality that it must adapt training pathways to an AI-enabled practice environment.

Disrupting the apprenticeship

Law was one of the first fields studied by AI researchers because it has clearly defined rules in many different areas (Dan Hunter, ‘The death of the legal profession and the future of law‘, University of New South Wales Law Journal (2020) 43(4), 1199–1225). Fast forward to today and AI and generative AI tools are becoming deeply embedded in the legal profession, especially among top-tier firms and other big players.

In a profession long defined by tradition, hierarchy and the management of risk, the furious pace of AI-driven change affecting the legal sector is disorienting for many law students, early-career practitioners and senior lawyers.

Indeed, the shift is more than the adoption of another new technology; it marks a fundamental change in how the legal profession operates. According to researchers at the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School who are exploring how AI is changing how legal services are delivered as part of a new project, AI is “structurally reconfiguring the profession – how legal services are delivered, who delivers them, how lawyers are trained and what it means to exercise professional judgement.”

Leading AI platforms such as Harvey and Legora are gaining traction across top-tier firms – almost half of Australia’s leading law firms use Harvey, as reported by Forbes Australia – and firms of all sizes are experimenting with general-purpose AI tools.

For young lawyers entering the profession during this period of profound change, the widespread adoption of AI is prompting questions about the future of the legal apprenticeship model and how juniors will develop core legal skills. AI is seen as a disruptor to traditional training pathways, with it increasingly handling routine legal tasks like research, contract analysis and document review, according to Clio’s latest Legal Trends Report.

“It’s now possible for the profession to see a time that AI will perform some tasks through which juniors traditionally built some of their legal skills and judgement,” says Dr Kate Booth, a former lawyer, legal technology consultant, academic and now head of learning and development at MinterEllison.

Dr Sergio Sulmicelli, a leading legal scholar with expertise in the intersection of AI and the law, highlights three tasks traditionally undertaken by lawyers now increasingly performed by AI in large firms: research, writing legal documents and litigation.

“For young lawyers, they now have more time to do legal reasoning instead of manual jobs like writing memorandums, but at the same time you risk losing some abilities – the so-called the ‘deskilling problem’,” says Sulmicelli, who was recently appointed to a three-year teaching and research position at The University of Sydney Law School.

Many commentators worry that while automating legal tasks often undertaken by juniors improves efficiency, it also risks unsettling the traditional ‘pyramid’ model of legal work, where early-career lawyers sit at the base doing high-volume tasks that gradually build the experience and judgement needed at senior levels of the profession.

These concerns are also playing out in hiring trends, with some top-tier firms reducing the number of junior hires as the traditional apprenticeship model comes under pressure. Thousands of legal roles, including many junior positions, could cease to exist by the mid-2030s, notes business futurist Morris Misel.

Amplify not replace expertise 

Despite the fears and doomsayers, many experts agree that the most significant change to the legal apprenticeship isn’t that early-career lawyers will do less – or that their roles will disappear altogether. It’s that AI will enable juniors to do different work earlier amid a widespread reshaping of the profession.

Julie Marcus from Marcus Legal is an Australian and Hong Kong-qualified lawyer who works with global organisations and private equity firms across the Asia-Pacific. She has been “dabbling in AI” since 2018 – “which is probably longer than most lawyers” – and developed an early view of how the technology could transform legal functions in-house and at a law firm level.

Marcus believes AI will not reduce the need for early-career lawyers, but that the traditional legal apprenticeship model will evolve to accommodate the skills and capabilities lawyers of the future will need. She says juniors will be charged with verifying what AI generates and that AI will accelerate learning by exposing them to a wider range of tasks and legal issues earlier in their careers.

“We’re going to be doing work differently at that junior level, and if anything, AI is going to sharpen the skills of these younger lawyers coming in. By delegating routine grunt work to machines, we do not erase the junior lawyer – we clear the runway for them,” Marcus says.

“Constant verification of AI outputs by junior lawyers will act like a flight simulator, rapidly building their confidence and the self-trust they need to transition into problem solving, intense research and complex legal strategy.”

Sulmicelli says AI is changing how lawyers approach drafting and research, but it’s not removing the need to understand these core processes. Instead, he sees AI as a form of “upskilling”, provided lawyers build critical literacy, including knowing how to verify AI outputs and comply with ethical rules.

Used properly, he argues, AI can enhance rather than replace the research capabilities of junior lawyers. “There will be a time in the future, if legal education does this right, where you want to have a lawyer that knows how to use artificial intelligence.”

Likewise, Booth says MinterEllison takes the position that “AI amplifies expertise rather than replacing it”. “AI fluency is fast becoming table stakes, not a specialism that only a few need. Every new lawyer entering practice today needs to be curious, prepared to work effectively with AI tools and to build their skills proactively with the resources on offer,” she emphasises.

Belinda Fisher, a specialist legal recruiter and partner at Burgess Paluch, believes most recent reductions in graduate hiring are largely “economically driven” and not directly related to AI. “It’s similar to what we saw during the pandemic,” she says, noting that AI “will make a junior lawyer’s role more exciting”.  “You’re not going to be bogged down with process driven work in terms of due diligence; you’re going to be adding a lot more value at an earlier stage.”

While some firms may cite automation as a reason for reduced graduate hiring, Sulmicelli argues this misreads the technology’s real impact on the profession. “The truth is that artificial intelligence will create the need for more lawyers,” he says.

Becoming experts in the loop

In many corners of the profession, the focus is shifting to how junior lawyers build expertise in an AI-enabled environment, with revamping the apprenticeship model a key area of focus.

The researchers at the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School point to a combination of possible approaches – accelerated simulations, mentorship, real-world exposure and AI-assisted feedback – that could aid junior lawyer training in an AI-enabled future. They argue that “the profession hasn’t seriously grappled with this question yet, and it needs to.”

Booth says the profession is focused on an “expert in the loop standard”, where AI generates an output but a qualified human reviews, verifies and takes responsibility for that output before it’s relied upon.

“The question for the profession is not whether early-career professionals will use AI; it’s how they also build their understanding of the legal reasoning beneath that output to interrogate it, to correct it and to take professional responsibility for it,” Booth says. “AI is most valuable when the expert in the loop is actively engaged – not just passively accepting outputs, but using AI as a tool, critically.”

What’s also becoming clear is that legal apprenticeships of the future will be faster paced and more cognitively demanding than in the past. Fisher says juniors will need to “think differently and creatively at an earlier stage”, while Marcus believes what has traditionally been a gradual, decade-long learning curve will compress significantly.

Crucially, she views these changes optimistically. “You’re going to have lawyers learning so much quicker and probably becoming sharper lawyers between zero and five years,” Marcus says. “The speed at which they do that verification work is going to be a lot quicker, and hopefully that then moves them into other exciting areas of learning and problem solving, which is exciting for young lawyers.”

Sulmicelli, who joined The University of Sydney Law School to help embed AI literacy into its core curriculum, says universities will play an important role in preparing graduates for this shift by building the underlying critical thinking and legal reasoning skills that allow early-career lawyers to interrogate AI outputs.

“Now you have to combine the traditional skills and knowledge of substantive law with knowledge of how artificial intelligence works, and especially how artificial intelligence can help you. The important thing is that we have to teach them how to use it with caution and with critical thinking. Legal education must be very focused on the idea of critical thinking,” he says.

Booth argues human capabilities like curiosity, communication, building trust, thinking critically and the ability to translate complex risk into commercial language – skills that AI can’t replicate or clients don’t want to accept from AI alone – will continue to set excellent lawyers apart in an AI-enabled profession.

Fisher agrees that technical skill alone won’t be enough as most employers want junior lawyers who are well-rounded. “With greater use of AI, it will be even more important for all lawyers, including juniors, to have emotional intelligence and strong client-facing skills,” she says.

For Sulmicelli, junior lawyers who master the human elements of legal work and develop fluency in AI will be best placed for future success. “Legal reasoning in the way that humans do it is something that artificial intelligence can never do. There is a very large space for a new type of lawyer who is literate in artificial intelligence, technology and law,” he says.