Is AI reducing the volume of traditional junior legal work at your firm? If so, how are you rethinking hiring, development, and progression to ensure a sustainable pipeline of future senior lawyers?
Here’s three of my favourite answers.
Talya Faigenbaum
Managing Director and Principal Lawyer at Nest Legal
AI is fundamentally reshaping the traditional pipeline of junior legal work. Many of the data-heavy research and drafting tasks that once formed the training ground for graduates can now be completed by AI tools in seconds. For small firms, this is genuinely transformative. AI allows leaner teams to deliver faster, more cost-effective outcomes for clients.
But this shift creates a new challenge: as foundational tasks disappear, where do junior lawyers fit within a small firm’s business model?
The answer lies in redefining the role itself. The old “apprenticeship of drudgery” is becoming obsolete.
Today’s juniors bring capabilities previous generations simply did not have. They are skilled in technological and data literacy and instinctively comfortable with online systems. The emerging next-generation lawyer is not just a trainee but a hybrid professional: part lawyer, part analyst, part innovation champion.
In practice, this means working alongside partners to test AI tools, analyse firm data and run small experiments to identify which systems genuinely improve quality and efficiency. Juniors also play a critical role as the first human reviewer of AI outputs, ensuring work is readable, accurate and genuinely responsive to a client’s problem rather than theoretical legal analysis.
Paradoxically, this requires more supervision by partners, not less. For small firms, this means investing more deeply in each junior we hire and as a consequence, hiring fewer of them.
But what results is a growing disconnect between what small firms need from their juniors and what many graduates imagined legal practice would be. Navigating that gap is becoming one of the defining challenges for small firms and the next generation of lawyers that want a future within them.
At Nest Legal we are embracing this shift. We’ve scaled back the number of junior roles within our team and invested more deeply in the people we do hire, empowering them to test our systems, trial new products, shape our social media strategy and explore new service models. For small firms like ours, building the next generation of senior lawyers will depend not on replicating the old apprenticeship model, but on reimagining it.
Ryan McKeen
Lawyer, Firm Owner, Author and Co-Founder of Best Era
AI is absolutely reducing traditional junior legal work at many firms, and it’s forcing a long-overdue conversation about how we develop the next generation of lawyers.
The traditional law firm pyramid was built on a simple premise: junior lawyers do high-volume, lower-complexity work, and over time, through repetition and exposure, they develop the judgment that makes senior lawyers valuable.
AI is collapsing the bottom of that pyramid: document review, basic research, first drafts and everything else. And firms are scrambling to figure out what comes next.
The answer I keep coming back to is intentional mentorship. Not the informal “osmosis” model that law firms have relied on for decades, but structured programs where senior lawyers are actively teaching judgment, walking associates through strategic decisions, explaining why they made certain calls, creating deliberate learning moments that used to happen organically through the grind of grunt work.
The goal isn’t fewer lawyers. It’s lawyers who reach the “judgment and experience” zone faster. That’s actually a better outcome for clients, for firms, and for the lawyers themselves.
But it requires firms to stop treating mentorship as a nice-to-have and start treating it as a core business function. The firms that figure that out first will have a serious competitive advantage in talent development.
Caralee Fontenele
Founder of Scalable Law
In our work coaching law firms to scale their practices, we are seeing two distinct mentoring approaches emerging for junior lawyers as AI becomes more embedded in legal practice.
The first is where firms begin to rely on AI as a substitute for junior lawyers. Particularly in smaller firms, where principals are already stretched, there is a tendency to reduce hiring of juniors and to use AI to complete tasks that would traditionally support early-career development. While this may improve short-term efficiency, it creates a longer-term risk.
The second approach is when firms use AI as a development tool alongside their junior staff. In these firms, AI is integrated into the way juniors learn and contribute. Juniors can draft, research, and sense-check their work before it reaches a supervising lawyer. This improves the quality of output and reduces the burden on principals and senior lawyers, allowing them to focus on higher-value strategy and client outcomes rather than correcting basic drafting errors.
What we are seeing is that AI works best when it supports, rather than replaces, the development of junior lawyers. There is a real risk that firms are not building the pipeline required for future mid-level and senior lawyers.
The firms that are intentional about using AI as a support tool are not only reducing pressure on teams but also building stronger, more capable teams for the future.