Serafina Concannon Addressees AI for Junior Attorneys at Thomson Reuters Synergy Conference

Session Description

How can junior attorneys use AI to transform their day-to-day work? Junior attorneys have always spent their early years on tasks that, while necessary, are not what drew them to the profession. AI is changing that equation. Junior attorneys can use AI tools to automate the administrative tasks that once consumed the first years of practice and get to real lawyering faster, freeing them to engage earlier and more deeply in the substantive legal work that matters: analyzing issues, building arguments, advising clients, and developing judgment. But this shift creates new challenges. Have law schools kept pace with what employers now expect new attorneys to know about AI? The knowledge gap between graduation and day one as a lawyer is not new, but the stakes are different now: attorneys who cannot use AI effectively risk falling behind, while those who rely on it uncritically risk compromising the quality of their work. This session is a practical guide to getting it right.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this session, participants will be able to:
  - Use AI to get to substantive legal work faster
  - Identify the AI competency gap between law school and practice, and take steps to close it from day one
  - Apply AI tools to core associate tasks in ways that improve quality, not just efficiency.
  - Recognize where AI adds value and where it creates caution
  - Engage more meaningfully with legal work by using AI to move past the routine and into analysis, strategy, and client advising that define the profession