So there’s this argument going around that AI is coming for the bottom of the pyramid first. It's logical as juniors do the volume work. If AI does the volume work better, and you're not experiencing crazy growth, there is less for juniors to do.
I think this is wrong.
Because I think this majorly misses the mark on what a junior is capable of when you level the playing field. That, to my mind is the only purpose of AI.
Fly on the wall
When I was a junior, the hard part was never the hours. The hard part was sitting in a room where literally everyone knew more than you. Maybe it's my personality but the reason that frustrated me was because good ideas only surface with context. If you don't have it, there's a major risk you say something so painfully obvious that you lose credibility or so stupid that you can never win it back. Great.
You get pulled into a call about something properly complex. Say a decarbonisation project. You’ve got engineers in there, a commercial team, a tax person, and a client who has been living inside this thing for two years. And they’re all talking in shorthand. Referencing structures you’ve never seen. Assuming context you just don’t have.
So what do you do. You nod. You write everything down. You say nothing useful. And then you go away and spend three hours afterwards just working out what was actually said, before you can even start being helpful.
Everyone treated that as par for the course. The only way to close it was experience. You used to have to earn context slowly, and the whole system was built on the idea that there was no other way to do it.
And for a long time, fair enough. There wasn’t. But there is now.
Now picture the same call
Same room. Same decarbonisation project. The technical stuff still goes over your head, like it always did.
But now you can ask. Quietly, instantly, right there. What does a contract for difference actually do? What’s the additionality risk on a carbon project? Why is the SPV sitting where it’s sitting? You get it explained in plain English while the conversation is still happening. Live, not three hours later.
So you’re not sitting there waiting to be useful anymore. You’re useful in the room.
And it goes way past just keeping up. A junior today can basically know everything about a client before the call. The business model, the cap table, the regulatory exposure, the last three deals they did. And not because they spent four seats slowly absorbing it. Because it’s all accessible now, and you can pull it together fast.
That’s not a small upgrade. That’s the stuff seniors spent ten years building up, and you’ve got it on day one.
And this is the bit I actually love
For most of the history of this profession, understanding the technical side was a moat. The people who understood the deal got to shape the deal. Juniors, by definition, were on the wrong side of that.
But once everyone can understand the technical playing field, the thing that separates people stops being access and starts being ideas.
And here’s what people forget. Juniors are full of ideas. They always were. They just never got to put them on the table, because they spent their first few years too busy decoding the room to actually contribute. By the time they understood enough to speak up, the opportunity had gone.
Take the decoding cost away and the instinct survives. Now you’ve got someone who understands the deal and still has fresh eyes. Someone who gets why it’s being done, and is still willing to ask why it’s being done that way at all. That combination used to be basically impossible. Now it’s the default for anyone who knows how to use the tools.
Because honestly, the best idea in a room doesn’t always come from the most experienced person. It comes from the person who understands enough to see the problem, and isn’t senior enough to have stopped questioning it. AI hands that seat to people who never used to get it.
More range, and a lot sooner
The old model rationed your exposure. You did four seats because four seats was roughly how long it took to build a working picture of how law and business actually fit together. The structure was a workaround for a learning problem.
But now, if you can decipher complexity on the fly, you can be useful across way more than four seats. You can move between corporate, commercial, regulatory, disputes, and actually carry real context into each one. Because the cost of getting that context has collapsed. Maybe AI will change training fundamentally, hopefully.
This is the same shift you’re seeing everywhere in legal. The question is now very much how much can each person amplify what they do. For seniors that means carrying the duty and making the call. For juniors it means showing up with range that used to take years to earn.
Let me be honest about it
None of this means the junior does less. It means the junior has a different breadth.
The grunt work that used to teach you context by sheer attrition, that’s going. To be honest, it was a terrible teacher anyway. What you get instead is a junior who understands the client faster, sees the technical picture more clearly, and adds real value earlier than any junior ever has.
If you’d handed me these tools as a trainee, I wouldn’t have been a worse lawyer for skipping the years of confusion. I’d have been a better one, faster, with far more interesting things to say.
So no, this isn’t a threat to junior lawyers. It’s genuinely the best thing that’s ever happened to them. In my very humble opinion.
The duty still sits with a person. The judgment still has to be earned, properly, the hard way. But the climb to get there just got a lot less lonely. And a lot more interesting.