When US-based law firm Orrick wanted to improve the UK company’s founding process in 2022, it was left to a team of lawyers streamlining the process.
Orrick Labs, a venture working on legal technology solutions for clients, has developed a digital form that simplifies the UK’s founding process. As part of Orrick’s strategy to train young lawyers as engineers, the company assigned the two associates to work closely with the project’s Orrick Labs legal technology specialists.
“We… we see future lawyers as a “triple festival” for Part Lawyer, a part-roadies counselor and part-technologist,” says Kate Oar, head of innovation at the Washington-based global head of practice innovation. The project covered all three.
The team revamped the UK’s founding process last year, one of several legal technology projects that Orick was assigned to associates. “The project combined legal insights, user-focused design and basic process engineering,” says ORR.
The need for lawyers to acquire technical tools that make more and more part of everyday lawyers. With generative artificial intelligence currently deployed worldwide, law firms and law schools are now more focused than ever on how the next generation of lawyers can broaden their skills.
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Orick is actively interested in the way law schools train students, “so that they can understand where they are when they arrive,” says Daniel Van Wort, managing director of legal talent at the company. The law firm will also partner with law school organizations such as the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology to host programs that are more likely to think about what is relevant when law students focus on technology.
A survey by the American Bar Association, which voted for 29 US law schools in the second half of 2023 and early 2024, found that 83% offered some kind of opportunity, such as a “practice,” where students could gain experience using AI tools.
“We’re constantly evolving the examples, applications and urgency of certain conversations, rather than tearing apart teaching notes every six months,” said Jeff Ward, director of the Center for Law and Technology at Duke University Law School.
He says basic skills such as critical thinking, ethical reasoning and understanding power structures remain solid. What changes is that lawyers need to apply them to rapidly changing technical landscapes, learn to be responsible and work effectively with AI.
The most valuable skill is not keeping up with all new AI tools, says Ward, who also serves as Oric’s resident scholar. Instead, we are developing an intellectual framework for evaluating new technologies through established legal and ethical lenses. The point is that “human and mechanical insights work increasingly in hand.”
Linklaters also invites law school experts to help train lawyers. The company, which developed an in-house-generated AI chatbot called Laila, has a variety of training programs, including mandatory enterprise-wide courses on new technologies. Another of the small cohort of expert lawyers was delivered last year by Dixon Poon Law School in King’s College London.
You need to know the materials at a level where you can see the strengths and limitations of AI
George Casey, Rinklerter, Penn Carrie Law School
George Casey, global chairman of Linklaters’ corporate division and chairman of the Americas, is also an adjunct professor at Pencarry Law School at the University of Pennsylvania, and has first-hand experience training lawyers in new technology.
Understanding how large-scale language models work is an important requirement for lawyers entering the profession, Casey says. But that’s far from a complete story. The job of a young lawyer is destined to fundamentally change from the long and current periods of time, reviewing source materials and sifting through thousands of pages of documents. Instead, it involves “overseeing the work (that) being done by AI,” he predicts.
“We need to know how to interact with AI and how to analyze results. And most importantly, we need to be able to apply judgments to work products that come from AI, which can only be obtained from experience,” he says.
This year, Casey will show students how AI’s new ChatGPT O3 model handles complex U.S. securities law analyses.
“The O3 model is very advanced, but it cannot replace what you learned in the classroom,” he says. “My main message is to drive AI to make lawyers better and sharper. However, we need to know the material at a level where we can see the strengths and limitations of AI.”
The Dixon Poon Law of Law of Law learns about the risks associated with using generator AI and many of its applications, says Dan Hunter of Executive Dean. They discuss hallucinations, bias, regulation, energy consumption, and sycophancy (where large language models are constantly consistent with users) and best practices to mitigate them.
Students can learn how to properly use these (generated AI) systems. . . And carve a new type of professional identity that has no future
Dan Hunter, Dixon Poon School of Law
Some students may be worried that AI can cut down on legitimate jobs, Hunter says, but that’s out of their control. But what’s within their control is “learning how to properly use these systems and carve out new types of professional identities that are grounded for the future.”
Law school alumni need to learn to run on different types of teams with new kinds of skills, Hunter says. They have always had to deal with the technology in some way, he argues, but the scale and speed of change are likely to be in a different order.
Some of the back-end areas of litigation have been affected by the transition to generation AI, such as the automatic age, but he hopes that most cases will escape the worst impact in the short term. Ripening the turbulent days are lucrative banking, transactions and other similar trading tasks, and “the ability to navigate these changes is essential,” he says.
Megan Carpenter, dean of the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School, argues that more emphasis on technical expertise requires traditional “soft skills.”
These include identifying misinformation, adapting to changes, asking analytical questions, and developing negotiations and relationships, she says. Teaching students how to think like a business advisor and hone their creativity is something that clients need, as well as the ability to generate AI prompts.
“Law school… not only does the students have knowledge, they are creatively working on critical thinking and problem solving,” says Carpenter. “And they’ll become more important because these skills are evergreens and our practices are more technically based.”
