For young lawyers, stepping into the legal profession today can feel thrilling – and a little overwhelming – thanks to the rapid rise of AI. Here, Lucy Southwick has shared three practical steps to help emerging lawyers harness AI with confidence and responsibility.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Protégé Podcast, Lucy Southwick, a recent manager within Ashurst Advance’s client solutions practice, outlined three practical steps young lawyers can take to navigate the fast-changing world of AI in law with confidence and effectiveness.
In the same episode, she outlined the top mistakes law students and junior lawyers make when using AI and highlighted how impactful working abroad can be for young lawyers seeking to broaden their professional horizons and gain highly transferable skills.
The first step, Southwick suggested, is simple yet powerful: upskill on AI.
She emphasised that this doesn’t mean mastering complex coding languages, but rather taking the initiative to explore online courses and follow thought leaders on platforms like LinkedIn.
“My first suggestion would be to upskill yourself on AI. Now this doesn’t have to be going and learning how to code in Python and building your own system,” she said.
“But LinkedIn learning, following key thought leaders on LinkedIn, doing, you know, Coursera courses online or other kinds of courses online, if you’re at university, choosing an elective for legal technology and tech reading.”
By understanding how AI operates, Southwick explained, young lawyers can approach these technologies with confidence and control, rather than fear.
“Once you understand the way this technology works, the kind of how it’s based on probability, mathematics, you begin to understand the concepts more, and it allows you to think in a way that you’re understanding what you’re working with, versus this being something that you’re not clear on, what sits beneath,” she said.
The second step Southwick encouraged is for young lawyers to experiment safely with AI tools, staying within the boundaries of their organisation’s procedures.
“Secondly, I would start experimenting safely. So if you’re working at an organisation, understanding what their procedures are, what their guardrails are, what tools you have access to, what you know, materials you can experiment with safely,” she said.
For those outside formal work environments or still at university, she recommended using freely available AI tools as a low-risk way to practice and experiment.
“If you’re on your own, I would be using some of the free-to-air tools, and whether that’s assisting you with something you can find online or some of the training, I would get hands on and start experimenting with the tools,” she said.
Finally, Southwick stressed the importance of using AI responsibly, emphasising that overreliance on these tools can backfire by undermining critical thinking, professional judgement, and practical skills.
“Then, finally, I would be really diligent in observing your own use and engagement with the tools. So what we really want to avoid is over-reliance on AI tools,” she said.
“I’m sure anyone who has over relied on using an AI tool to help them write emails or to help them summarise their uni notes, and then if you went today and decided, OK, I’m actually going to do this myself, and you tried to do it, you realise that it can quickly become quite challenging if you give all of the tasks that you need to do to AI.”
“So it’s really about responsible use, and that is really just about understanding when and why you should work with AI.”
