While excitement grows around artificial intelligence and its potential to transform the legal profession, Lucy Southwick has warned law students and junior lawyers to remain vigilant and avoid the critical mistakes she has observed when using the technology.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Protégé Podcast, Lucy Southwick, a recent manager within Ashurst Advance’s client solutions practice, outlined the top mistakes law students and junior lawyers make when using AI – and why these are pitfalls they must avoid
In the same episode, she highlighted how impactful working abroad can be for young lawyers seeking to broaden their professional horizons and gain highly transferable skills.
One of the biggest mistakes Southwick observes junior lawyers make when integrating AI into their daily work is placing too much reliance on the technology to replace their essential professional responsibilities and judgement.
“Over-reliance on the AI output is definitely the biggest mistake that I see kind of in my day-to-day, and that is because these tools are incredible at providing really well-written and well-structured language,” she said.
“But at the end of the day, the obligation is on us as lawyers, and to those of you who are going to be admitted into becoming a lawyer and join the profession, the obligation is on you.”
With many lawyers increasingly tempted to lean heavily on AI tools and incorporate them into legal research, drafting, and other practice areas, Southwick warned that such use must be carefully reviewed, as blind reliance can be a serious misstep.
“Anything that you’re providing needs to be reviewed and certified by you as the lawyer. That is really just on our obligations to our clients and to the court,” she said.
She explained that this is the reality of over-reliance, noting that many law students and junior lawyers view AI as a way to make their work faster and easier – but she warned that shortcuts carry real risks.
“I think the tendency potentially for more junior people is actually to use AI when AI might not be needed. So that might be the first idea that you’ll come up with, or how to start something new,” she said.
“Often, it’s quite challenging to get from nothing to something, and that can be a useful point where AI could come into the picture or where you need to do the thinking yourself. So overuse and over-reliance without real checking and clarification. That’s some big errors that I see juniors run into.”
However, Southwick also noted the opposite problem: junior lawyers, burdened by billable hour pressures and tight deadlines, often struggle to experiment with AI, delaying their engagement with and development of the technology.
“But then on the other end of the spectrum would be juniors who maybe … when you’re working so hard and you’re under a lot of time pressure and potentially you’ve got billables, hit all of those things, you might not be motivated to actually experiment,” she said.
“The different side of the spectrum is not taking the time to learn and experiment with the technology because of the demands on you as a lawyer in the present day.”
Since avoiding AI entirely can be risky for professional development, Southwick stressed the importance of carving out time – no matter how much or little – to experiment and build confidence in using the technology.
“That is definitely the other side of the coin, in which I would definitely encourage carving out time to be an active participant in this changing wave of our industry because it is coming and it is really changing the way that we’re working,” she said.
