Neil Sands
Artificial intelligence (AI) will take the “grunt work” out of being a junior, but law firms must step up and ensure they train entry-recruits in skills such as critical thinking, so they develop into senior practitioners, one of the profession’s top human resources experts says.
Jo Stevenson, people and culture director at Simpson Grierson, told the LawFest conference in Auckland last week that AI was fundamentally changing the role of junior lawyers.
“What AI is targeting, in terms of workflows and tasks and things that, is the data-rich and repetitive processes that we [once] set for our juniors — that grunt work that we’re so familiar with and have fond memories of,” she told a panel hosts by The Law Association chief executive Clayton Kimpton.
“Starting my career as a lawyer, I’ll never forget those hours, and frankly months, of sitting in war rooms with Eastlight folders from floor ceiling, flipping through this stuff from cover to cover with sticky dots that were yellow for privileged and red for not.
“That’s been in the past for a while now Thanks goodness, is all I can say. Our juniors are not going to cut their teeth on those sorts of tasks anymore. That’s a great thing. What it means is we can sell law [as a career] really differently. We can sell law as something that they can really get up to speed on super quickly. They’ll have a coach in their pocket or their hand who’s readily available to help… they’ll have feedback in real time.
“The trajectory of their learning, where they begin in law firms will be so much for appealing.”
However, even though everyone hated doing grunt work, Stevenson said it served a purpose, and law firms need to find ways to replicate the skills it developed in junior lawyers.
“Juniors are going to be deployed into much more meaningful tasks, but they still have to learn, because we need them to become the seniors of the future, otherwise we’ll be a dying breed,” she said.
So I think what we have to be really intentional about… is what tasks are we giving our juniors so that they’re developing those critical thinking skills, so that they can become really sharp and astute at being real lawyers, really soon.”
Clayton Kimpton, Wenee Yap, Jo Stevenson, and Hayden Wilson.
Don’t believe the hype
On the same panel, Dentons New Zealand chair Hayden Wilson said that leaders within law firms needed to consider how AI was impacting their lawyers, both in terms of the real changes taking place in the workplace and the constant, unfounded hype about the new technology taking jobs and making the legal profession redundant.
“You have to create environments that are psychologically safe for people to do their jobs, but also their jobs are changing at the same time — so they have to be psychologically safe in that sense as well,” he said.
“This idea that AI is going to come and take all of the lawyers’ jobs – one, it’s hyperbolic, and two, it’s just mean. It’s just mean because it’s not true, [although] your job’s going to change.
“Our job is at an institutional level is to create the environment where our people can get the best possible results for our clients, and they do that by having the best possible environment to work in.
Stevenson said being a lawyer was inherently stressful but uncertainty about AI had increased pressure within the profession, which law firms needed to work on minimizing.
“I think it’s more around the pace of change and the uncertainty that we’re sitting with,” she said. “Everybody in this room is here because we want to know what the gold nuggets are to solve some of these problems and understand how we protect our people from the negative side of it [AI], the hyperbole and the anxiety that comes along with it.
“We have a responsibility, that’s what organizations will need to lean into. They’ll have to put good resources behind this as well.”
‘Think slow’
Author Wenee Yap said the key to using AI was not accepting the information it generated at face value, saying the technology presented material with great certainty, but it was often “confidently wrong”.
“AI tricks you into accepting it’s output because it’s so confident… [receiving the output] is only half the process,” she said.
“To use AI well, you also need to think slow. You need to pause and take a breath, that’s psychological safety coming in, otherwise you’re just getting stressed out thinking ‘I thought that was right, but it’s not and now I’m in trouble’.
“You take a step back and think slow. You check the work like you’d check the work of anyone who gave you [a document]. Look at it, see what works and what doesn’t, and make it yours.”
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