Junior Lawyers: Your Next Big Bet in the Era of AI?
The conversation around junior lawyers and artificial intelligence has taken a fearful turn. Much of the commentary fixates on risk and the fear that young lawyers will over-rely on AI, skip the foundational learning of previous generations, and enter a profession with fewer entry-level roles.
The anxiety is understandable: if technology can perform much of the research, drafting and document review that once defined the early years of legal practice, what happens to the traditional junior-lawyer model?
But this view overlooks a massive opportunity. Instead of treating AI as a threat to junior development, firms should see junior lawyers as their greatest opportunity in the era of AI. They are the most adaptable, most curious and most ready to experiment. Where some see risk, others will find leverage if they are willing to bet big on juniors.
The case for betting on juniors
Today’s junior lawyers are digital natives. They navigated complex tools at school, university and at home. Their instinct is to test, learn and iterate: traits that perfectly suit the integration of AI into their legal work.
Rather than slowing them down, firms could give them structured access to technology and the freedom to explore how it can improve accuracy, speed and client outcomes.
This doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means raising it. If a task once took eight hours and AI now handles the first five, the remaining three MUST be spent pushing the quality higher. The expectation should be that work is not only faster, but closer to client-ready. More thoughtful, more strategic and more valuable to the reviewer. Juniors using AI should deliver work products that are ready for senior review rather than drafts that require rebuilding.
As a junior family lawyer, my senior spent hours redlining my document summaries and affidavits. If this was today, I could have expected her to immediately give it back requiring a higher standard of work.
Balancing innovation with discipline
The challenge is not whether juniors should use AI, but how they are trained to do so. A culture of blind trust in technology is no better than blind tradition. Juniors should learn how to assess AI-generated output, how to question it, and how to integrate it into the legal reasoning process. The focus of training shifts from “doing the work” to “understanding and improving the work that technology produces.”
This new model demands high-quality feedback, clear benchmarks and an emphasis on professional judgment. It also requires leaders who model the right balance. Encouraging experimentation while insisting on excellence.
The Return on Investment
The return on this approach is powerful. Firms that invest in the next-gen will build a future-ready workforce. Lawyers who are fluent in both legal analysis and technological risks.
They will see higher-value contributions sooner, as juniors spend less time on mindless copy/pasting and more time on complex thinking. The outcome is not only greater efficiency but also faster resolutions and better client care.
Conclusion
At Mary, we encourage firms to rely on juniors and paralegals to leverage what Mary produces by reviewing and improving on the output, prior to collaborating with their seniors. Foreseeable issues arise when lawyers simply skip the rigour the legal profession requires.
The anxiety surrounding the lawyers of the future is well-placed, but like all good problems perhaps it represents an even greater opportunity. Bet big on juniors!
Author: Rowan McNamee, Co-Founder & COO, Mary Technology
A former lawyer turned legal tech innovator, Rowan McNamee is the Co-Founder of Mary Technology - a Fact Management Platform that empowers dispute resolution teams to analyse and review evidence up to 90% faster.
