Executive summary
The legal profession faces a critical paradox. As AI becomes more capable, lawyers risk becoming less so. Recent empirical research reveals a troubling correlation between increased AI usage and diminished critical thinking abilities among legal professionals — a phenomenon that threatens the analytical foundation of effective legal practice.
This paper examines how the emergence of agentic AI — autonomous systems capable of independent planning, reasoning, and workflow execution — fundamentally changes the risk-benefit equation for legal professionals. Unlike traditional AI tools that respond to prompts, agentic AI operates independently, creating unprecedented opportunities for cognitive enhancement or cognitive atrophy depending on implementation strategy.
We present evidence-based frameworks for harnessing AI's transformative potential while preserving and strengthening the critical thinking skills essential to legal excellence. Through strategic collaboration with advanced AI platforms, legal professionals can amplify their analytical capabilities rather than outsource them, ensuring that human judgment remains central to legal decision-making in an AI-augmented future.
The stakes are clear — lawyers who learn to think with AI will thrive; those who let AI think for them will find their professional competence — and their clients' interests — at risk.
About the authors
Section 1: The issue — AI's impact on critical thinking
The cognitive offloading phenomenon
Recent research by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School found significant correlations between frequent AI usage and critical thinking skills:
- AI usage vs. critical thinking: r = -0.68; moderately strong negative correlation
- AI usage vs. cognitive offloading: r = +0.72; moderately strong positive correlation
- Cognitive offloading vs. critical thinking: r = -0.75; moderately strong negative correlation
Valerie's perspective. Having practiced litigation for a decade before transitioning to legal technology, I've witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. During my practice, I developed strong analytical skills through necessity — every brief required deep engagement with precedent. Now, working with AI-driven solutions, I see how these cognitive muscles can atrophy when lawyers become too dependent on automated analysis.
Lance's perspective. Over my 35 years at Thomson Reuters, I've seen multiple waves of legal technology adoption. What's different about AI is the speed and depth of cognitive replacement. Previous technologies enhanced capabilities — like better search and faster document review. AI, however, can perform cognitive tasks, creating both unprecedented opportunities and the risk of intellectual dependency.
The agentic AI revolution
Agentic AI operates as autonomous agents that can:
- Perceive their environment through APIs and document interfaces
- Plan and execute complex, multistep workflows independently
- Make real-time decisions and adapt strategies without constant human input
- Proactively pursue goals rather than simply responding to queries
This autonomy intensifies cognitive offloading risks by enabling:
- Workflow automation beyond human oversight. Agentic AI can autonomously conduct comprehensive due diligence reviews, draft complex contracts, and manage entire discovery processes.
- Strategic cognitive offloading. The delegation of not just routine tasks, but the strategic thinking that underlies effective legal practice.
- The "black box" problem magnified. Multistep processes where each decision influences subsequent actions, creating decision trees nearly impossible for humans to follow or validate.
Professional responsibility implications
Valerie's legal practice perspective. The autonomous nature of agentic AI creates unprecedented professional responsibility challenges:
- Supervision standards. How can lawyers adequately supervise systems operating independently across multiple tasks?
- Competence requirements. What level of understanding must lawyers maintain about AI decision-making processes?
- Client communication. How do lawyers explain strategies developed autonomously by AI systems?
Section 2: Impact on legal professionals
The critical thinking imperative in law
Legal practice fundamentally depends on critical thinking skills that AI's cognitive offloading effects directly threaten. AI's ability to automate routine tasks allows lawyers to focus on higher-value activities that require critical thinking, creativity, and nuanced understanding. These are skills that machines cannot replicate, yet reports of "hallucinated" cases and quotations pulled from some platforms have been cited in court filings, as the attorneys using them are met with sanctions for lacking diligence.
The skill atrophy acceleration problem
Agentic AI may accelerate skill atrophy effects through:
- Junior lawyer development crisis. New attorneys may miss opportunities to develop foundational analytical skills
- Pattern recognition dependency. Lawyers may become dependent on AI rather than developing their own analytical abilities
- Strategic thinking erosion. AI can handle strategic planning, potentially creating lawyers skilled at managing AI but lacking independent strategic thinking
Transformative agentic AI applications in legal practice
Document review and contract analysis
Discovery breakthrough. AI analyzed discovery documents in complex commercial litigation, revealing subtle linguistic patterns in executive communications that occurred precisely around alleged misconduct — patterns that escaped traditional keyword searches. The AI provided transparent reasoning, enabling the legal team to build a compelling narrative that led to favorable settlement.
Contract analysis victory. During M&A due diligence, AI analysis of hundreds of legacy contracts identified critical indemnification language variations creating $15 million liability exposure — achieving 94% accuracy versus 85% for experienced lawyers. Transparent AI reasoning enabled comprehensive remediation strategy, preventing significant post-closing liability.
Legal research and case law
Federal appeals transformation. Westlaw Advantage — the legal industry's first professional-grade agentic AI-powered legal research solution — completed comprehensive analysis of novel jurisdictional arguments in 10 minutes. Unlike traditional AI that summarizes results, Deep Research creates research plans, executes iteratively, and delivers structured reports with inline citations and transparent reasoning.
Brief drafting and workflows
Appellate efficiency. CoCounsel's guided workflows reduced document review time by 63% and legal know-how tasks by 10% during a tight three-week federal appellate deadline. The system guided attorneys through multistep processes, providing Practical Law resources and first drafts, with "AI starts to feel less like a tool and more like a teammate."
Predictive analytics
Strategic litigation intelligence. Westlaw Litigation Analytics transformed case strategy in employment discrimination matters by analyzing judge ruling history, opposing counsel patterns, and case outcomes. Data-driven insights — including motion success rates, average ruling times, and settlement probabilities — enabled sophisticated litigation strategies resulting in favorable settlement.
AI as litigation skills accelerator
Enhanced pattern recognition and strategic thinking
AI tools built by litigators for litigators streamline legal drafting and case analysis while training junior lawyers through better structure. Agentic AI handles comprehensive case law analysis and factual pattern identification, freeing litigators to develop creative legal theories, anticipate opposing strategies, and craft nuanced arguments leveraging multiple precedents in novel ways.
Accelerated hypothesis testing and argument development
AI expedites case assessment and early identification of key facts and issues by automating routine tasks like document review. Instead of hours spent manually researching counterarguments, litigators use agentic AI to rapidly generate and test multiple legal theories. They can explore more strategic angles to develop stronger, more comprehensive litigation strategies in significantly less time.
Deeper client advocacy through strategic focus
Law firms report significant time savings on document drafting, allowing greater focus on client advocacy over paperwork while providing competitive advantages for better settlement terms. Agentic AI handles discovery management, brief formatting, and routine motions, freeing experienced litigators to concentrate on what differentiates excellent advocacy. They can build compelling narratives, develop courtroom presence, read judges and juries, and make strategic pivots that turn solid cases into winning outcomes.
Section 3: Evolution of legal education
Current challenges
Traditional legal pedagogy emphasizes case method instruction, Socratic questioning, and clinical experiences. However, students increasingly arrive with diminished critical thinking skills due to pre-law AI exposure while expecting to use AI tools throughout their careers.
Integrating AI literacy with critical thinking development
Progressive approaches include:
Section 4: Using Thomson Reuters tools to promote critical thinking
Cocounsel Legal: Strategic enhancement framework
CoCounsel Legal is the all-in-one AI legal solution, bringing together multistep work spanning legal research, document analysis, and drafting into a single, seamless, AI-powered workflow.
- Strategic decision-making support. Uncover nuanced insights that enable sharper, more strategic decisions, transforming routine legal work into opportunities for high-level strategic analysis and competitive advantage.
- Expert-guided analytical workflows. End-to-end agentic workflows built by legal experts provide structured thinking frameworks while expert-created prompts guide lawyers through comprehensive analytical processes without compromising professional judgment.
- Authoritative research foundation. Verifiable results grounded in trusted Westlaw and Practical Law content create a solid intellectual foundation, enhanced by over 225 years of proprietary editorial enhancements, that supports confident critical analysis.
Learn more about CoCounsel Legal
Westlaw Advantage: AI-driven critical thinking tools
Westlaw Advantage, also available within CoCounsel Legal, combines agentic AI with industry-leading Westlaw content to accelerate your legal research workflow.
- Expert AI-powered research. Deep Research delivers expert-level legal research using custom-trained agentic AI with transparent, step-by-step research notes and comprehensive reports showing arguments on both sides, developing analytical transparency as lawyers must critically evaluate AI methodology while weighing competing legal arguments.
- Comprehensive case development. Claims Explorer helps uncover the strongest claims and defenses, while AI Jurisdictional Surveys streamline comprehensive law surveys, promoting systematic case evaluation as lawyers must critically assess claim strength across jurisdictions.
- Litigation document analyzer. Enhances critical thinking through Citation Issues functionality that prompts attorneys to question source reliability, Mischaracterization Identification that challenges case interpretation, and Arguments and Counterarguments analysis that encourages strategic thinking by surfacing potential weaknesses.
Final thoughts
Valerie's perspective. The future of legal practice will be transformed by agentic AI tools that amplify human judgment and expertise in unprecedented ways. The transparency of current systems — robust workflows in CoCounsel Legal and verifiable research plans in Westlaw Advantage — empowers lawyers to collaborate seamlessly with AI reasoning processes, creating dynamic partnerships that elevate both efficiency and analytical depth. These autonomous systems become intelligent thinking partners that enhance our capabilities while keeping human wisdom at the center of legal decision-making.
Lance's perspective. After 35 years of witnessing legal technology evolution, I'm convinced that agentic AI represents the most exciting advancement our profession has ever encountered. This technology opens doors to new frameworks for AI collaboration, sophisticated verification protocols, and innovative approaches that will strengthen the critical thinking skills that define excellent legal practice. We're not just adapting to change — we're pioneering a new era of legal excellence.
Our shared commitment. As opportunities multiply, so does our potential for positive impact. We are witnessing the dawn of an era filled with unprecedented possibilities for lawyers to serve clients more effectively, solve complex problems more creatively, and expand access to justice on a global scale. By embracing agentic AI as sophisticated collaborative partners, legal professionals can harness autonomous artificial intelligence to amplify the analytical rigor and human insight that make legal practice both powerful and purposeful.
The legal profession stands at an extraordinary threshold of opportunity. We have the chance to harness agentic AI's autonomous capabilities to dramatically enhance our professional competence, expand access to justice, and redefine what's possible in legal practice. This transformation invites us to engage with intentional enthusiasm, embrace systematic innovation, and celebrate the uniquely human elements that will make AI-enhanced legal practice more effective, more ethical, and more impactful than ever before.
Endnotes
² Clio. (2024). Legal Trends Report. Clio.
³ Thomson Reuters. (2024). Generative AI in Professional Services Report. Thomson Reuters.
