The Starting Gun for Legal AI Has Fired. Who in Our Profession is on the Starting Line?
The legal profession’s “wait and see” approach to artificial intelligence is now officially obsolete.
This isn’t hyperbole. This is a direct consequence of the White House’s new “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan.” After spending the last few days studying the plan and its implications, I’m convinced this isn’t another report to be filed away or a topic for a future committee. This is the starting gun for a race that will define the next fifty years of our profession, and I’m concerned that most of us aren’t even in the stadium, let alone in the starting blocks.
For too long, we’ve operated within the comfortable confines of the very problematic Langdellian case method. This framework was developed at Harvard in the 1870s to create elite analysts focused on the past. It was considered by some as an revolutionary innovation for its time. Today, it’s an anchor weighing the profession down. When the official policy of the United States shifts from cautious observation to an all-out imperative for AI dominance, clinging to a 150-year-old model isn’t just nostalgic. It’s a strategic blunder.
If the Socratic Method truly means anything, isn’t it time we applied its rigorous questioning to ourselves? We must question our foundational assumptions about the billable hour, the partnership track, our resistance to new forms of legal service delivery, and the very definition of what it means to be “practice-ready” in the 21st century. What do our clients, our students, and users of the legal system need?
The AI Action Plan forces a fundamental re-imagining of our industry’s core jobs.
The New Job of Legal Education: Producing AI-Capable Counsel
The plan’s focus on a “worker-centric approach” is a direct challenge to legal academia. The new job of legal education is no longer just to teach students how to think like a lawyer, but how to perform as an AI-augmented one. This means producing graduates who are not only familiar with the law but are also capable of leveraging AI tools to deliver legal services more efficiently, ethically, and effectively. Even more importnat, it means we must develop lawyers who can give the advice needed to individuals and companies already at work trying to win the AI race.
A curriculum that allows individual law professors to ban the use of AI tools isn’t defending academic rigor. It’s akin to a math department banning calculators. Law schools must establish an institutional baseline of AI exposure, ensuring that every student graduates with a core competency in prompt engineering, AI ethics, and the use of AI-powered legal tech platforms. Failure to do so is a failure of our mission to prepare students for the world as it is and will be.
The New Job of Lawyers: From Legal Analyst to Strategic AI Advisor
For practitioners, the shift is just as profound. The new job of the lawyer is to guide clients through the immense opportunities and novel risks of this AI-driven world. The routine work—document review, legal research, contract drafting—will be increasingly commoditized by AI. However, the real value will lie in strategic judgment: advising a client on the intellectual property implications of training a proprietary AI model, accelertatying AI-driven product launches, and faciliitating winning under these new guidelines.
This requires new mental models, new strategics, and vastly different levels of understanding than what we were taught in law school and tested on bar exams.It is a new world and we need lawyering for this new world, not the old world.
The Choice: Architecture or Irrelevance
As I reviewed the Action Plan, one quote from General Eric Shinseki kept coming to mind: “If you dislike change, you will like irrelevance even less.”
This is the choice now facing every law firm managing partner, every law school dean, and every practicing lawyer. We can be the architects of the future of justice and commerce in an AI-powered world, or we can become high-profile casualties, clinging to our precedents while the world innovates without us. I know which I’m choosing.
Raad it and see if you agree with me.
The race has already started. The direction is now clear. The question now:
Which will be forced to change first: the law firm business model or the law school curriculum?
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
Want to schedule a Zoom call to talk with me about Legal Innovation as a Service, Speaking, or other services? Schedule a Zoom with Dennis via Calendly.
DennisKennedy.com is the home of the Kennedy Idea Propulsion Laboratory
Like this post? Buy me a coffee
DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.
Need a little help with your legal innovation efforts? Check out my Legal Innovation as a Service offerings.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.