The same partner who once refused to use email because "it would never replace the fax machine" is now confidently declaring AI "just a fad" after trying it exactly once.
Last week while scrolling through LinkedIn, I came across a post from a senior partner at a respected litigation firm that made me smirk. With evident frustration, he recounted his brief experiment with AI: "I asked it to summarize a recent New York state decision on landlord-tenant law, and it completely misrepresented the holding," he wrote. "This confirms what I suspected—AI is nothing but hype and has no place in serious legal practice. I won't waste my time with it again."
The post had several comments from other attorneys echoing similar sentiments: AI is unreliable, it makes things up, it's dangerous for legal work. While I understand these concerns, they miss a fundamental point about how AI should be used in legal practice. The value isn't in expecting perfect answers – it's in leveraging AI to enhance your existing expertise and workflows.
I believe that the secret to leveraging AI in legal practice is understanding it's not an all-knowing oracle but rather an enthusiastic first-year associate: potentially valuable, frequently overconfident, and absolutely requiring supervision before anything goes to the client.
The most successful lawyers I've worked with don't ask AI to "write a motion to dismiss" and blindly trust whatever emerges. Instead, they understand that AI excels as:
Simply put: AI tools should complement your legal expertise, not replace it.
As Professor Richard Susskind, author of "The Future of the Professions," notes: "The challenge for lawyers is not to outcompete AI but to use it to produce better outcomes than ever before for clients. Those who regard AI solely as a competitor to humans misunderstand its true potential."
As I explained in my article "The Expert Advantage: Why AI Amplifies Legal Expertise Rather Than Replacing It," the lawyers with the deepest subject matter expertise often extract the most value from AI. This creates what I call the "expertise paradox" – the more you know about your field, the more value you can extract from AI tools.
Why? Because expert lawyers can immediately spot when AI gets something wrong, craft more precise prompts, and understand how to integrate AI-generated content into their established workflows. The attorneys who benefit most from AI are those who already excel in their practice areas.
One litigation partner I work with explained it perfectly: "I don't need AI to know the law – I need it to help me articulate the law more efficiently so I can focus on strategy."
Identifying the right use cases is extremely important. Think of AI as your "amazing intern" – not replacing your work but handling the tasks that free you to practice at the highest level.
The best way to approach this is to analyze your workflow and identify:
Every practice area has different opportunities. Estate planning attorneys might leverage AI for initial draft documents, while litigators might use it to analyze deposition transcripts for inconsistencies.
Dr. Gillian Hadfield, Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, emphasizes this point: "The most valuable application of AI in legal practice isn't replacing lawyers – it's augmenting their capabilities by automating routine tasks so they can focus on the complex, human aspects of lawyering that truly deliver value."
Rather than asking AI to "analyze this case," successful lawyers use prompts like: "Based on these facts, identify potential causes of action under California employment law, potential defenses, and what additional information would strengthen each position."
They then evaluate the output against their knowledge, using it as a checklist to ensure they've considered all angles.
Instead of "draft me a contract," effective practitioners use prompts like: "Here's our standard NDA template. Identify provisions that might need customization for a technology client concerned about protecting their AI training data."
The AI highlights areas to focus on, but the lawyer applies judgment on final language.
Forward-thinking attorneys are using AI to develop a deeper understanding of their clients' businesses and industries before providing legal advice.
For example: "Analyze recent regulatory changes in renewable energy financing that might impact my client's solar development business in the Southwest. Include potential legal implications for project financing, land use, and tax incentives."
This approach allows attorneys to provide truly customized legal guidance that addresses not just the immediate legal question but considers the client's broader business context, industry trends, and strategic goals. The result is advice that feels bespoke rather than generic, strengthening the attorney-client relationship.
Identifying the right use cases is probably the most challenging but ultimately rewarding aspect of using AI in legal practice. When you truly understand AI's capabilities and limitations, you can envision countless ways it can enhance your practice. However, attorneys who lack this understanding often default to using AI like Google – simply asking it to search for information and expecting perfect answers.
I've observed that lawyers who struggle with AI adoption typically approach it with the wrong mental model. They ask, "Can AI do my job?" rather than "Which specific aspects of my work could AI enhance?" The breakthrough moment comes when an attorney shifts from viewing AI as a competitor or replacement to seeing it as a specialized tool that excels at particular tasks.
One partner at a mid-sized firm described his epiphany: "For months, I was skeptical about AI. Then I realized I was asking it to do things it wasn't designed for while ignoring capabilities that could save me hours each week. Once I started viewing it as a tool for specific purposes – like generating first drafts of routine documents or analyzing trends across case files – everything changed."
The quality of AI output directly correlates to the quality of your prompts. Here are techniques that consistently yield better results:
Let's address the elephant in the room: lawyers who fail to effectively integrate AI into their practice will eventually operate at a competitive disadvantage.
This isn't about AI replacing attorneys – it's about augmented attorneys outperforming their non-augmented peers. When one lawyer can produce high-quality initial drafts in minutes rather than hours, respond to client inquiries with greater speed and depth, or analyze case law more comprehensively, the market will notice.
The adoption curve is already creating separation. Early adopters are developing proprietary workflows and prompt libraries that amplify their expertise. Those who dismiss AI entirely often do so based on outdated assumptions about its capabilities or unrealistic expectations about its purpose.
Yes, AI will hallucinate. It will occasionally fabricate cases, misstate the law, or generate convincing but incorrect analyses. However, this doesn't mean it's not worth using.
AI models are continually improving, and while we're not at 100% accuracy, neither is any human being. AI makes mistakes just like humans do. The difference is that knowledgeable attorneys can quickly identify these errors and correct them – often more easily than finding errors in work produced by junior associates or paralegals.
By using AI in advantageous ways, you can make it enhance and augment your work, freeing yourself from redundant tasks to spend more time with clients – learning about their business, their needs, their dreams, objectives, goals, and what keeps them up at night. This is the true value of legal counsel that no AI can replace.
Remember that your ethical obligations remain unchanged. You must:
The question isn't whether lawyers should use AI – it's how we can use it responsibly to enhance our practice while maintaining the judgment, ethics, and expertise that define our profession.
AI is a powerful tool in our arsenal, but like any tool, its value depends entirely on how skillfully we wield it. The lawyers who thrive won't be those who rely on AI for answers, but those who use it to amplify their own expertise and judgment.
What's your experience using AI in legal practice? Have you found effective prompting techniques or use cases worth sharing? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.