Danks: Need to build judgement
The profession is worried about how junior lawyers will develop fundamental legal skills in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), new research has found.
As AI becomes embedded in legal workflows, leaders face a choice: “Treat it as a productivity hack, or as a tool that reshapes how lawyers think, learn, and exercise judgment.”
And this will need to be reflected in how success is defined, putting the spotlight once more on the billable hour.
A survey last month of 873 UK lawyers for the LexisNexis report, The mentorship gap, found that 72% have concerns junior lawyers using AI will struggle to develop legal reasoning and argumentation, while 69% are worried new lawyers lack verification and source-checking skills. Just 2% believe AI strengthens their learning.
While lawyers reported productivity benefits when using AI – indeed, a third said their work was of a higher quality – “the same time-saving benefits may come at a hidden cost” to juniors.
“Pouring over lengthy contracts, interrogating every clause, and immersing yourself in case law may not be glamorous, but these tasks have traditionally been how legal judgment is formed,” it said.
The report quoted Emma Danks, head of UK corporate at City firm Taylor Wessing, who said that as AI took on the routine, high-volume tasks that have traditionally shaped the early years of a legal career, junior lawyers would find themselves engaged in more complex work far earlier.
“That accelerates development, but it also means we need to be deliberate about how we build judgment and strategic thinking alongside technical capability,” she said.
Half of junior lawyers themselves said they worried about becoming too reliant on AI.
The solution, according to two-thirds of respondents to the survey, was to reposition how junior-level lawyers viewed AI as a “thinking partner”, rather than a shortcut.
“Framed this way, AI becomes a tool for challenge, iteration, and validation – not a replacement for legal reasoning.”
Just over half supported verification exercises that required juniors to check AI outputs against authoritative sources.
The research showed how associates placed greater emphasis on billable hours as a performance metric than law firm leaders (54% v 38%). For leaders, revenue growth was the most importance metric.
“What leaders choose to prioritise inevitably shapes how AI is used. Where billable hours dominate, speed and throughput are likely to become the primary focus,” the report said.
“Where client feedback is prioritised, accuracy, quality, and client care take precedence. And where revenue growth leads, AI is more likely to be directed towards innovation, new services, and upsell opportunities.
“For junior lawyers, these priorities act as powerful cues. They influence not only how AI is deployed day-to-day, but how much time is spent questioning outputs, verifying sources, and exercising judgment. What gets measured and rewarded quickly becomes what gets optimised.”
The report concluded: “Closing the mentorship gap means doing more than rolling out AI. It means being clearer about expectations, spending more time coaching people on how to question AI outputs, and being explicit about what ‘good’ legal judgment actually looks like day-to-day.
“The teams that get this right won’t treat AI as a shortcut. They’ll treat it as a thinking partner – one that helps people learn faster without skipping the fundamentals. And in the long run, that’s how firms will build lawyers who are not just more productive, but more confident, capable, and trusted too.”
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