New ways to develop new lawyers

Generative AI is going to wreck the traditional methods by which new lawyers learn the ropes. What can we do? Forecast lawyers' future roles and reverse-engineer their development.

Last month, I looked at the slow-motion collapse of first-year lawyer hiring at the largest law firms in the US and Canada, and I asked: “Where will tomorrow’s lawyers come from?” I’m deeply concerned that as law firms focus more on technology-based productivity, they’ll need (and hire and train) fewer new lawyers all the time. Given that we already license lawyers before they’re fully competent, the loss of on-the-job training in law firms threatens to leave thousands of newly called lawyers effectively unemployable.

I’ll continue to urge legal regulators to address this issue by unifying, redesigning, and transforming the lawyer development system. This would require a root-and-branch overhaul of legal education and lawyer licensing to enable new lawyers to enter the profession skilled, confident, and ready to serve clients effectively. Law firms, in the result, would become places for lawyers to sharpen and accelerate their professional development, not to begin their journey towards basic competence.

What I’m really looking for is fundamental reform of the lawyer formation process — redesigning and restructuring the first ten years of lawyers’ professional lives. I don’t ask for much, do I? But I wouldn’t be trying if I didn’t think it was essential to the legal profession’s survival. Recent advances, like Oregon’s new lawyer licensing pathways, are important and welcome, confirming that this is within our reach. It might be Mission Difficult, but it’s not Mission Impossible.

In the meantime, though, we need to find the best new lawyer training approaches today and amplify these insights throughout the profession. A good place to start would be this recent article from LexFusion’s Casey Flaherty: “Education in the Age of Gen AI: The Old Way of Training Law Firm Associates ‘Just Doesn’t Work.’” You should read Casey’s article (and its two companion pieces) in full, but here are some key excerpts for our purposes:

The challenge becomes how to train young lawyers when the traditional brute-force methods are no longer viable — because the machines are superior at entry-level tasks. … “We have to think about how we disseminate judgment and discernment without the manual slog that people learned through in the past,” explained Caitlin Vaughn, managing director of learning and professional development at Goodwin. “If new lawyers are not going to learn by doing a task repeatedly and making lots of mistakes, we need a new approach.” …

Goodwin’s intensive, eight-week new-associate training program blends self-paced learning, experiential live training sessions, and interactive exercises with real-time feedback … [It] enables associates to learn from the highest-quality work rather than via volume, and by integrating useful feedback that supports their learning. … Vaughn concluded, “We can’t take a lecture-based approach to training anymore. It just doesn’t work. In fact, it never really worked.” 

The first element I want to highlight here is what Casey describes as the “‘three-legged stool’ of asynchronous learning via videos, live learning sessions led by senior attorneys, and interactive practice exercises that provide real-time feedback on simulated work product.” I immediately recognized this tripartite structure from what I consider the two best bar admission programs in the world, both here in Canada: The optional Law Practice Program (LPP) stream in Ontario and the mandatory Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP) in four other provinces.

These programs begin with a few weeks of self-paced autonomous video learning, continue with live training sessions and interactive exercises with instructor feedback, feature a simulated virtual law firm experience and/or an actual legal work placement, and conclude with a personalized assessment of the candidate’s overall readiness to practise law. Candidates start learning on their own, come together to build skills with colleagues, and go on to practise those skills with feedback, until everyone agrees that an acceptable level of entry-level competence has been reached.

Particularly interesting is that both Goodwin’s first-year training program and the Canadian bar admission systems feature a hybrid approach that integrates self-paced individual learning with in-person group work. They counter the concern law firms commonly express to me, that new lawyers need to be in the office every day to learn the ropes. These programs demonstrate not only that lawyer training is possible in a hybrid work environment, but also that it might be a lot better.

The second element of interest is how these programs flip the script on professional legal training. They’re both premised on the crazy idea that maybe the focus of a lawyer’s professional formation should be on the lawyer.

One of my biggest complaints about traditional lawyer licensing is that the candidate is the object, not the subject, of the process. We talk endlessly about law degrees and bar exams because we’re focused on the credentialing institutions, not on the people who want to be lawyers. Aspiring lawyers collect costly credentials and endure a scrutinizing initiation in order to enter the profession. Whether they’re fit to serve clients or make a living upon licensure rarely comes up, because the process is really about keeping people out of the profession, not helping people to thrive in it.

Law firms have taken a similar approach to the development of their associates. They’ve mostly left lawyers’ formation to the vagaries of chance, or to the demands of whichever partner’s gravity well a lawyer happens to fall into (if they fall into one at all, which many women and racialized lawyers never do). Lawyers’ growth as professionals has been secondary to the firm’s need for leveraged revenue generation and their practice groups’ strategies. Associates have been treated primarily as a means to the law firm’s ends, not as ends in themselves.

We need a new approach to lawyer development, one that’s actually focused on developing a lawyer. Goodwin’s first-year training program is again a good example, and I was fortunate (through the intercession of Ian Nelson, co-founder of video-based lawyer learning platform Hotshot) to connect with Caitlin Vaughn earlier this month to gain further insights into Goodwin’s program.

Caitlin described how modern lawyer training needs to be highly customized, because this generation has grown up with personalized content. That means the development process must be learner-guided. Young lawyers at Goodwin are encouraged to build early awareness of their goals and what’s needed to achieve them, to identify an industry-oriented career focus (and its required competencies) sooner and more clearly. Shifting away from the kind of passive, unstructured lawyer growth that’s marked most legal career paths, it puts lawyers in the driver’s seat of their own development, where they belong.

The third and maybe most interesting trend to note here is that we’re starting to move beyond simply new ways to develop lawyers. We have an opportunity — I’d go so far as to say we have an obligation — to develop a new type of lawyer.

Every fresh article about Generative AI in law firms that describes AI as “an associate with superhuman abilities” or forecasts that there’ll be “less demand for entry-level and junior associates” or warns that “anything that can be automated with Generative AI will be,” drives home the reality that lawyers will not be hired to do in future all the things they were hired to do in the past. Less complex and less sophisticated legal work will be automated — and the bar for what constitutes “less complex” will keep rising.

I’ve written before that the rapid disappearance of low-level legal work will remove law firms’ short-term economic rationale for hiring new lawyers. But the challenge goes beyond that. The work on which we have developed lawyers in the past is simply not work that lawyers will do in future. Why develop a proficiency in lawyers that won’t be called upon? It would be like training associates to become great stenographers — what would be the point?

My argument to law firms is that they need to start developing lawyers, as soon as they can and as fast as they can, to become the highest-value, most client-focused, most strategic-thinking lawyers around — because that’s the only kind of lawyer clients will hire in future. The only kind of lawyer work will be “partner-level” work, so you’d better create as many great “partners” — or whatever better term we hopefully come up with — as you can.

Refer again to Goodwin’s training program. Its ultimate goal, said Caitlin, is to build lawyers who are trusted advisors. So start with that destination in mind, and work your way backwards to assemble the required building blocks. Those include legal expertise, agility, independence, and other salient features of high-value lawyers. But they especially include relational skills — the ability to connect with and engage clients and colleagues, because this generation in particular has had fewer opportunities to develop this critical attribute.

Essentially, law firms need to figure out what clients will be hiring lawyers to do three, five, and ten years from now. And then they have to create three-, five-, and ten-year development plans to turn their exceptional young legal talent into those sorts of lawyers. We need firms to do this because as things stand, they’re our only real engines of innovation when it comes to lawyers’ professional growth.

But we need more of those engines, because we can’t just leave lawyer formation to the vagaries of the private bar. As I’ve said, this is what legal regulators and educators should also be doing, and I hope they find the wherewithal and inclination to do so fast.

In the meantime, anyone and everyone with an interest in making better lawyers (and making lawyers better) can and should throw their hats into this ring. Don’t wait for a gilt-edged invitation, or even for permission. If you’ve got a good idea, pursue it. If you think you’ve got part of the solution, let’s hear it.

Where will tomorrow’s lawyers come from? They’ll come from any law firm, company, entity, or institution that recognizes the fundamental fracturing of the traditional lawyer development process, and that dedicates itself to building a new, lawyer-centric, client-minded, AI-adjusted approach to developing proficient, trustworthy, and effective lawyers who practise at the very top of their licenses.

Those are the lawyers the future world needs. Let’s all get busy developing them.