How to ensure AI sharpens, not dulls, legal minds
I’m not a lawyer. However, my journey to learn Russian and my study of AI in business applications suggest that some lawyers will hurt their careers in one of two ways:
- By relying too much on AI, or
- By running with no AI assistance
Thankfully, neither has to be true.
AI saves valuable time for legal professionals in both law firms and in-house teams, which in addition to increasing the resources they can apply to their work can also increase their quality of life.
So how can AI—specifically its latest forms, generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI—bring about this shift, and how its users strike the right balance between underuse and over-reliance?
Let’s call it the AI-work-life balance.
Jump to ↓
What lawyers can learn about using AI from language learning
Dangers of AI becoming a crutch
Efficiency paired with critical thinking
Examples of healthy AI work-life balance
What lawyers can learn about using AI from language learning
Learning a new language can be overwhelming, and it certainly was for me. Living, studying, and working in Russia for a few years was a massive challenge but an exciting growth experience. The cold weather and different culture were intimidating, but the Russian language itself was its own behemoth.
Pride and the potential threat of embarrassment limited my progress. Equally detrimental was the temptation to over-rely on my Russian teacher, who also spoke fluent English.
Learning a new language and learning how to use AI can cause similar reactions for lawyers. There are two general reactions that I’ll delineate into two groups.
One group has an unspoken fear, or simple reluctance to learn and become fluent in the use of AI. It’s perfectly understandable. What lawyer has that time? On the other hand, a second group may foolishly depend completely on AI and derail a case in court.
Let’s briefly address the former group, first starting with an encouraging thought.
The key to learning a new language is the same key that unlocks the potential benefit of AI — which is the process of breaking down large, complicated concepts into smaller bite-sized parts. It’s really no different from the building blocks of any learning approach.
The Russian grammar and case system is notoriously difficult to learn; every single word morphs into one of six forms depending on its contextual use.
It was important to learn one case type, for one part of speech, and one word at a time.
What we’ve learned is that it takes a while to reach a [level of] proficiency with any advanced technology, including AI. You can’t go from never having seen a large language model to using it in your workflow with a high degree of efficacy.
General Manager – Global Large Law Firms, Thomson Reuters
So why should this be encouraging?
Lawyers can also break complex legal tasks down into smaller steps or skills that AI can handle. Yet certain skills, as we’ll conclude, should be entrusted to legal professionals.
Dangers of AI becoming a crutch
Many lawyers are quickly adopting AI for legal work. The profession and industry are asking, how much, and what kind of use is too much?
Cue in the second group. Unfortunately, there’s a growing roster of lawyers who’ve misused AI to present false and hallucinated information. What can we learn from their mistakes?
Some lawyers did not fully understand the limitations and proper use of consumer-grade AI tools. There’s always inherent risk of using any tool without reading its manual. Others may assume the citations brought to court were real or did not verify the citations.
There’s a lot of value in allowing AI to brute-force its ways through problems as a starting point and then being really thoughtful about how and where you apply human judgment and governance.
Chief Technology Officer, Thomson Reuters
Microsoft used a different lens to explore risk. Their researchers looked at survey responses from 319 experts who used GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot at least once a week. It also looked at 936 real-world tasks accomplished with GenAI tools by those experts. Although the report relied on certain English-speaking demographics and self-reporting, it still provokes a lot of questions.
These were a couple of key findings:
- Cognitive laziness — AI can cause long-term overreliance and less critical thinking.
- Skill degradation — Just as learning math or a new language requires practice and repetition, mastering tasks involves engaging in repetitive, mundane work that builds and sharpens essential skills.
The study found that “Lower self-confidence may lead users to rely more on AI, potentially diminishing their critical engagement and independent problem-solving skills. This reliance on AI can be seen as a form of cognitive offloading, where users depend on AI to perform tasks they feel less confident in handling themselves.”
The lesson is clear — rely too much on a crutch and your critical thinking muscles gradually weaken.
Efficiency paired with critical thinking
While AI certainly improves efficiency, it can also inhibit critical thinking and independent judgment. So, how can efficiency and critical thinking converge so that lawyers can be efficient critical thinkers?
The first step is honest self-awareness. They need to identify which tasks they trust AI to handle and which tasks they believe they can perform more effectively.
Microsoft researchers underscored the significance of this discernment:
“GenAI tools can decrease knowledge workers’ cognitive load by automating a significant portion of their tasks, but as knowledge workers have more confidence in doing the task themselves, they employ more engaged practices in steering AI responses, especially when applying (Application) and evaluating (Evaluation) AI responses.”
Lawyers and their teams must identify when and how critical thinking fits into a workflow, and when it’s appropriate to invite AI into the process.
Generally, verification of AI-generated content such as case law citations is an obvious starting point.
At this point, hopefully you’re asking, “What are other ways AI can help with efficiency and critical thinking?”
Examples of healthy AI work-life balance
A healthy AI-work-life balance is not strictly about time management. As we’ve seen, AI can be a crutch and erode lawyers’ cognitive faculties.
It can also propel them from one task to another like a springboard to save time — yes, but more importantly — it can also make their work experience more enjoyable.
Healthy integration within legal workflows would mean that AI could:
- Facilitate verification — Important to reemphasize the need to verify AI-generated content with the most trusted and authoritative resources.
- Enhance awareness — Highlight potential risks and downstream harms, ask clarifying questions to prompt lawyers to critically evaluate outputs.
- Boost motivation — Position critical thinking as a means for long-term skill development and professional growth within the interface.
- Receive tailored levels of assistance — Allow lawyers to regulate the extent of autonomous AI assistance based on their confidence levels and task complexity.
That last bullet is where agentic AI turns the springboard into a self-driving vehicle, or to put it more accurately, an autonomous orchestra conductor.
Lawyers can use AI assistants to take care of the mundane, routine tasks one step at a time; initial case law research, document summarization, aspects of contract review, and so on.
However, a conductor develops the vision, corrects issues, and ensures precision and quality of performance.
This combination of orchestration and evaluation is the way to have an agentic system undertaking more and more complex tasks that is able to operate for longer without human intervention.
Senior Director, AI Partnerships and Strategy, Thomson Reuters
Agentic AI goes beyond GenAI assistants that require step-by-step guidance and prompting. Agents use large language models (LLMs) that orchestrate tools in a loop. They independently strategize, think logically, and carry out complex tasks according to predefined goals under human oversight and control. They’re dynamic, can learn from mistakes, and become maestros, so to speak.
In my Russian language class, I could’ve asked questions in English and allowed my teacher to do the hard work of critical thinking for me early on. Instead, I tried my best to ask questions in Russian, and had her guide my thinking, so I came to my own conclusions.
Similarly, it would be unwise, especially for young lawyers to rely on AI for every single task.
After all, it’s in repetitive, rote work where attorneys hone and master the most basic skills first. However, once they master more advanced critical thinking skills, lawyers will be able to run and do much more with AI than without it.
What makes the current generation of LLMs truly extraordinary, then, is not what they alone can do, but what they enable.
Head of Product, CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters
Human-like conversations with LLMs are relatively easy now. Think of an AI agent as an autonomous executive assistant that can work as part of your team. Now imagine how this will enable new relationship dynamics and change how you manage your firm or legal department.
Ultimately, using AI to achieve a healthier work-life balance will be both an art and a science. Furthermore, the distinction between motivated AI-backed lawyers and complacent AI-dependent lawyers will be an important one to make as a leader.
It’s the motivated lawyer with a healthy work-life-AI mindset who will do the most valuable work. This is where critical judgment, strategic thinking, and relationship building belong and thrive under a human lawyer’s domain and expertise.
