When US-based law firm Orrick wanted to improve its UK company incorporation process in 2022, it tasked a team of lawyers with streamlining the process.
Orrick Labs, a venture that works on legal tech solutions for clients, developed a digital form that simplifies its UK incorporation process. As part of Orrick’s strategy to train young lawyers as technologists, the firm assigned two associates to work closely with the Orrick Labs legal tech specialists on the project.
“We . . . think about the lawyer of the future as a ‘trifecta’ of part-lawyer, part-business counsellor and part-technologist,” says Kate Orr, Washington-based global head of practice innovation for Orrick. The project covered all three.
The team revamped the UK incorporation process again last year, and it was one of several legal tech projects Orrick assigned to associates. “The project blended legal insight, user-focused design, and basic process engineering,” Orr says, and was an example of how lawyers and technologists work together on practical improvements.
The need for lawyers to master the tech tools that are increasingly part of everyday lawyering is well-established. Now, as generative artificial intelligence is rolled out across the globe, law firms and law schools alike are focusing more than ever on how the next generation of lawyers will broaden their skills.
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Orrick takes an active interest in how law schools train students, says Danielle Van Wert, managing director of legal talent at the firm, “so that we have an understanding of where they are when they arrive”. The law firm also partners with law school organisations, such as Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, to host programmes that give law students a better idea of what is involved when legal practices centre on tech.
A study by the American Bar Association, which polled 29 US law schools in late 2023 and early 2024, found that 83 per cent of them offered some kind of opportunity such as “clinics” where students could gain experience in using AI tools.
Jeff Ward, director of Duke University law school’s law and technology centre, says: “I’m not tearing up my teaching notes every six months, but I am constantly evolving the examples, the applications, and the urgency of certain conversations.”
Foundational skills — such as critical thinking, ethical reasoning and understanding power structures — remain solid, he says. What is shifting is that lawyers need to apply them to a fast-changing technological landscape, and to learn to work responsibly and effectively with AI.
The most valuable skill is not keeping up with every new AI tool, says Ward, who also serves as a scholar in residence at Orrick. Instead: “It’s developing the intellectual framework to assess . . . new technologies through established legal and ethical lenses.” The point is that “human insight and machine insight increasingly work hand-in-hand”.
Linklaters also invites law school experts in to help train its lawyers. The firm, which has developed an in-house generative AI chatbot, called Laila, has a range of training programmes, including a mandatory firm-wide course on the new technology. Another one for a small, expert cohort of lawyers was delivered by the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London last year.
George Casey, global chair of Linklaters’ corporate department and chair of the Americas, is also an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Carey Law School, where he has direct experience of training lawyers in new tech.
An understanding of how large language models work will be an essential requirement for lawyers entering the profession, Casey says. But that is far from the full story. A young lawyer’s job is destined to change radically from the current long hours reviewing source materials or sifting through thousands of pages of documents. Instead, it will involve “overseeing [that] work being done by AI,” he predicts.
“We will need to know how to interact with AI and how to analyse the outcome . . . And most importantly, we will need to be able to apply judgment to the work product coming from AI that can only come from experience,” he says.
This year, Casey plans to show students how Open AI’s new ChatGPT o3 model handles complex US securities law analysis.
“The o3 model is highly advanced, but it still cannot replace what we learn in the classroom,” he says. “My main message will be that AI pushes lawyers to be better, to be sharper, [but] you need to know the material at the level where you can see AI’s strengths and limitations.”
At the Dickson Poon School of Law, students are learning about the risks involved in using generative AI, as well as its many applications, says Dan Hunter, executive dean. They discuss hallucinations, biases, regulations, energy consumption and sycophancy (when a large language model constantly agrees with the user) — and the best practices for mitigating them.
Some students may worry that AI could cut legal jobs, Hunter says, but that is out of their control. What is within their control, however, is “to learn how to use these systems appropriately . . . and carve out a new type of professional identity that is future-proof”.
Law school graduates will need to learn to operate in different kinds of teams, with new kinds of skills, Hunter says. They have always had to deal with tech in some form, he argues, but the scale and speed of change is likely to be of a different order.
Some back-end areas of litigation are being affected by the shift to generative AI, such as automated chronologies, but he expects most litigation to escape the worst effects in the short term. It is the lucrative banking, dealmaking, and other similar transactional work that is ripe for upheaval, he says: “An ability to navigate these changes is going to be vital.”
Megan Carpenter, dean of the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, argues that a greater emphasis on technical expertise will require traditional “soft skills” to match.
These include identifying misinformation, adapting to change, asking analytical questions, negotiating and developing relationships, she says. Teaching students how to think like business advisers and honing their creativity will be as necessary to clients as any ability in generative AI prompts.
“Law school . . . doesn’t just help students with knowledge, but with critical thinking and working creatively on problem solving,” Carpenter says. “And those skills are evergreen, and they’re going to be more important as our practice becomes more technologically based.”