Knowing how to use AI is not a career plan. Neither is assuming you can build a career without learning it. For a young lawyer, the better approach is to develop two sets of skills at the same time: the skills that make you a good lawyer and the skills that help you use technology to do better work. One does not excuse neglecting the other. Together, they give you a better chance of doing more than keeping your job. They position you to earn trust, take on responsibility, and help shape how your firm practices.
You cannot guarantee yourself a job by mastering a particular platform. You can make yourself more valuable by learning the work, developing judgment, and helping the people around you use AI well. That is where I would focus if I were starting my career today.
Learn the Work Before You Hand It Off
Learn how to draft a motion that gives the judge a reason to rule for your client. Understand the relief you seek, the governing standard, the supporting evidence, and the weakness the other side will attack. Before asking AI for a draft, write a short outline yourself. Decide what matters. Then compare its approach with yours. Where did it improve the argument? Where did it miss the point? Check the authorities and the record. Ask a senior lawyer why the final version works. Do not limit your education to watching someone approve the finished product.
Apply the same discipline to discovery and depositions. Before drafting requests, identify what you need to prove and which documents or witnesses could supply that proof. Before taking a deposition, decide which admissions you need and what you will do with them—practice following an unexpected answer instead of reading the next question on your outline. An AI-generated list of questions may help you prepare. It does not relieve you of understanding the witness, listening to the answers, or deciding when to pursue one. Learn the purpose of each task, not just how to produce its usual deliverable.
Put your understanding to a simple test: close the draft and explain the issue to someone. Can you defend the argument without rereading it? Can you explain why you omitted a question or narrowed a request? If you cannot, return to the underlying work. Recognizing an answer when it appears on a screen is different from knowing enough to reach it yourself.
Write, Speak, and Follow Through
Make writing a daily practice. Take a page you drafted and cut what the reader does not need. Put the recommendation before the background. Replace vague language with facts. Read your work aloud. Then practice explaining the same issue without the document in front of you. Give a colleague a two-minute case update. State the problem, the options, your recommendation, and the next step. Ask what was unclear. A client should not need a second lawyer to translate what you said. A partner should not have to search three pages for your point.
Work on the less glamorous skills, too. Keep a reliable calendar and task system. Break large assignments into steps. Confirm what is due, when it is due, and what the finished work should accomplish. When several lawyers assign competing tasks, flag the conflict and ask them to help set priorities. Do not call frantic switching between assignments multitasking. Protect time for work that requires concentration. Return calls. Send updates before someone asks. Raise problems while you still have time to fix them. Being capable matters. Being capable and dependable gives people a reason to trust you with more.
Treat Judgment as a Skill You Can Practice
You don’t have to wait twenty years to start developing judgment. Whenever you ask a senior lawyer what to do, bring your own recommendation and explain it. Identify the facts you relied on, the assumptions you made, and what would change your mind. You may be wrong. That is useful if you learn why. Ask why the lawyer chose one approach over another, not merely what assignment comes next. Listen for considerations you missed: cost, timing, credibility, relationships, the client’s tolerance for risk, or the danger of winning an argument that does not advance the case.
Keep a learning journal without client-identifying or confidential details. Record a prediction, the reasons behind it, and what actually happened. Revisit decisions after hearings, negotiations, and difficult conversations. Was the reasoning sound even though the result disappointed you? Did a good result hide a poor decision? Ask for candid feedback. Judgment grows when you examine how you reached a conclusion rather than simply congratulating yourself when things work out. Wisdom also means knowing when you lack enough information, when to ask for help, and when a client’s interests require you to abandon your favorite argument.
Learn AI Through the Work You Already Do
Give AI a place in your professional development, not just a place on your phone. Choose a recurring task and learn how to improve it using an approved tool. With public, fictional, or properly authorized material, test whether it can organize a chronology, challenge a draft argument, or simulate questions from a skeptical judge. Define the task, provide the relevant context, and specify what a useful result looks like. Ask it to distinguish supported facts from assumptions and identify gaps. Treat those instructions as a starting point, not a guarantee that it will follow them.
Then evaluate the result against the source material and your own analysis. Verify quotations, citations, dates, and factual claims. Look for omissions as carefully as mistakes. Measure the time spent preparing inputs and checking outputs, not just the seconds it took to generate an answer. Keep examples of what worked and what failed. Test with material you already understand so you can spot errors. Try a record with conflicting dates or a missing page. See whether the tool flags the problem or still supplies an answer. That exercise teaches you more than a flawless demonstration. Learn your firm’s rules on approved tools and client information before uploading anything. Do not assume a paid account makes every use appropriate. The goal is not to become the person who generates the most text. It is to produce better work through a process you can explain and defend.
Help Your Firm Get Better at It
Once you understand a useful application, teach it. Start with a narrow problem your team actually has, not a presentation about how AI will change everything. Perhaps lawyers spend too much time turning public court materials into internal training exercises. Build a sample process using those materials. Show the original task, the instructions, the output, the corrections, and the final product. Explain where human review remains necessary. Invite a skeptical colleague to test it. A demonstration that includes mistakes gives your team more useful information than one that hides them.
Offer to help develop a checklist, train a colleague, or maintain a small collection of tested instructions for approved uses. Work with the people responsible for technology, security, and supervision rather than creating a workaround they do not know about. Keep the effort manageable and agree on its scope with your supervisor. You still have legal work to learn and perform. You aim to connect practical legal knowledge with practical technology use. That combination can help you contribute beyond your own assignments without becoming the unofficial help desk for every software problem in the office.
Protect the Practice That Builds Your Skills
Be deliberate about what you do yourself. For selected training exercises, draft the argument before asking AI to critique it. Build a chronology from a manageable set of records, then compare it with an AI-assisted version. Prepare your own deposition themes before seeking alternatives. Use fictional or public materials, or arrange supervised training time. Do not duplicate client work and assume the client should pay for your education. The point is to preserve the practice that teaches you to recognize what is missing, unsupported, or strategically unwise.
Set a weekly routine you can sustain. Practice one legal skill, test one AI application, and discuss one decision with a more experienced lawyer. Ask to observe a hearing, attend a client meeting, or handle a defined part of a matter under supervision. Seek responsibility that requires you to think and explain your choices. Keep learning both sides. Spending every spare hour experimenting with software will not teach you how to handle a difficult witness. Ignoring the software will not prepare you to help a team use it responsibly.
Build Toward Responsibility
No permanent certificate makes a career safe from change. Build toward becoming the lawyer others trust with the next problem. Know the facts. Write clearly. Listen. Meet your commitments. Use AI where it helps, recognize where it fails, and help your colleagues understand the difference. Keep asking for harder work and honest feedback. The objective is not to compete with software at producing a first draft. It is to become a lawyer who can decide what should be drafted, explain why it matters, and take responsibility for the result.
Frank Ramos is a partner at Goldberg Segalla in Miami, where he practices commercial litigation, products, and catastrophic personal injury. You can follow him on LinkedIn, where he has about 80,000 followers.
The post How Young Lawyers Can Build A Career That Outlasts The Next AI Update appeared first on Above the Law.
Knowing how to use AI is not a career plan. Neither is assuming you can build a career without learning it. For a young lawyer, the better approach is to develop two sets of skills at the same time: the skills that make you a good lawyer and the skills that help you use technology to do better work. One does not excuse neglecting the other. Together, they give you a better chance of doing more than keeping your job. They position you to earn trust, take on responsibility, and help shape how your firm practices.
You cannot guarantee yourself a job by mastering a particular platform. You can make yourself more valuable by learning the work, developing judgment, and helping the people around you use AI well. That is where I would focus if I were starting my career today.
Learn the Work Before You Hand It Off
Learn how to draft a motion that gives the judge a reason to rule for your client. Understand the relief you seek, the governing standard, the supporting evidence, and the weakness the other side will attack. Before asking AI for a draft, write a short outline yourself. Decide what matters. Then compare its approach with yours. Where did it improve the argument? Where did it miss the point? Check the authorities and the record. Ask a senior lawyer why the final version works. Do not limit your education to watching someone approve the finished product.
Apply the same discipline to discovery and depositions. Before drafting requests, identify what you need to prove and which documents or witnesses could supply that proof. Before taking a deposition, decide which admissions you need and what you will do with them—practice following an unexpected answer instead of reading the next question on your outline. An AI-generated list of questions may help you prepare. It does not relieve you of understanding the witness, listening to the answers, or deciding when to pursue one. Learn the purpose of each task, not just how to produce its usual deliverable.
Put your understanding to a simple test: close the draft and explain the issue to someone. Can you defend the argument without rereading it? Can you explain why you omitted a question or narrowed a request? If you cannot, return to the underlying work. Recognizing an answer when it appears on a screen is different from knowing enough to reach it yourself.
Write, Speak, and Follow Through
Make writing a daily practice. Take a page you drafted and cut what the reader does not need. Put the recommendation before the background. Replace vague language with facts. Read your work aloud. Then practice explaining the same issue without the document in front of you. Give a colleague a two-minute case update. State the problem, the options, your recommendation, and the next step. Ask what was unclear. A client should not need a second lawyer to translate what you said. A partner should not have to search three pages for your point.
Work on the less glamorous skills, too. Keep a reliable calendar and task system. Break large assignments into steps. Confirm what is due, when it is due, and what the finished work should accomplish. When several lawyers assign competing tasks, flag the conflict and ask them to help set priorities. Do not call frantic switching between assignments multitasking. Protect time for work that requires concentration. Return calls. Send updates before someone asks. Raise problems while you still have time to fix them. Being capable matters. Being capable and dependable gives people a reason to trust you with more.
Treat Judgment as a Skill You Can Practice
You don’t have to wait twenty years to start developing judgment. Whenever you ask a senior lawyer what to do, bring your own recommendation and explain it. Identify the facts you relied on, the assumptions you made, and what would change your mind. You may be wrong. That is useful if you learn why. Ask why the lawyer chose one approach over another, not merely what assignment comes next. Listen for considerations you missed: cost, timing, credibility, relationships, the client’s tolerance for risk, or the danger of winning an argument that does not advance the case.
Keep a learning journal without client-identifying or confidential details. Record a prediction, the reasons behind it, and what actually happened. Revisit decisions after hearings, negotiations, and difficult conversations. Was the reasoning sound even though the result disappointed you? Did a good result hide a poor decision? Ask for candid feedback. Judgment grows when you examine how you reached a conclusion rather than simply congratulating yourself when things work out. Wisdom also means knowing when you lack enough information, when to ask for help, and when a client’s interests require you to abandon your favorite argument.
Learn AI Through the Work You Already Do
Give AI a place in your professional development, not just a place on your phone. Choose a recurring task and learn how to improve it using an approved tool. With public, fictional, or properly authorized material, test whether it can organize a chronology, challenge a draft argument, or simulate questions from a skeptical judge. Define the task, provide the relevant context, and specify what a useful result looks like. Ask it to distinguish supported facts from assumptions and identify gaps. Treat those instructions as a starting point, not a guarantee that it will follow them.
Then evaluate the result against the source material and your own analysis. Verify quotations, citations, dates, and factual claims. Look for omissions as carefully as mistakes. Measure the time spent preparing inputs and checking outputs, not just the seconds it took to generate an answer. Keep examples of what worked and what failed. Test with material you already understand so you can spot errors. Try a record with conflicting dates or a missing page. See whether the tool flags the problem or still supplies an answer. That exercise teaches you more than a flawless demonstration. Learn your firm’s rules on approved tools and client information before uploading anything. Do not assume a paid account makes every use appropriate. The goal is not to become the person who generates the most text. It is to produce better work through a process you can explain and defend.
Help Your Firm Get Better at It
Once you understand a useful application, teach it. Start with a narrow problem your team actually has, not a presentation about how AI will change everything. Perhaps lawyers spend too much time turning public court materials into internal training exercises. Build a sample process using those materials. Show the original task, the instructions, the output, the corrections, and the final product. Explain where human review remains necessary. Invite a skeptical colleague to test it. A demonstration that includes mistakes gives your team more useful information than one that hides them.
Offer to help develop a checklist, train a colleague, or maintain a small collection of tested instructions for approved uses. Work with the people responsible for technology, security, and supervision rather than creating a workaround they do not know about. Keep the effort manageable and agree on its scope with your supervisor. You still have legal work to learn and perform. You aim to connect practical legal knowledge with practical technology use. That combination can help you contribute beyond your own assignments without becoming the unofficial help desk for every software problem in the office.
Protect the Practice That Builds Your Skills
Be deliberate about what you do yourself. For selected training exercises, draft the argument before asking AI to critique it. Build a chronology from a manageable set of records, then compare it with an AI-assisted version. Prepare your own deposition themes before seeking alternatives. Use fictional or public materials, or arrange supervised training time. Do not duplicate client work and assume the client should pay for your education. The point is to preserve the practice that teaches you to recognize what is missing, unsupported, or strategically unwise.
Set a weekly routine you can sustain. Practice one legal skill, test one AI application, and discuss one decision with a more experienced lawyer. Ask to observe a hearing, attend a client meeting, or handle a defined part of a matter under supervision. Seek responsibility that requires you to think and explain your choices. Keep learning both sides. Spending every spare hour experimenting with software will not teach you how to handle a difficult witness. Ignoring the software will not prepare you to help a team use it responsibly.
Build Toward Responsibility
No permanent certificate makes a career safe from change. Build toward becoming the lawyer others trust with the next problem. Know the facts. Write clearly. Listen. Meet your commitments. Use AI where it helps, recognize where it fails, and help your colleagues understand the difference. Keep asking for harder work and honest feedback. The objective is not to compete with software at producing a first draft. It is to become a lawyer who can decide what should be drafted, explain why it matters, and take responsibility for the result.
Frank Ramos is a partner at Goldberg Segalla in Miami, where he practices commercial litigation, products, and catastrophic personal injury. You can follow him on LinkedIn, where he has about 80,000 followers.
