A few days ago, a junior associate on my legal team walked into my office brimming with excitement. He told me he had used one of the popular AI platforms to generate a perfectly formatted and legally sound draft of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
I took a quick look at the MOU and noted that the AI platform had, for the most part, faithfully replicated our law firm’s style, from the letterhead and font to the formatting, alignment, and overall presentation of the document.
As much as I wanted to share his excitement, the millennial lawyer in me, trained by meticulous Baby Boomers and Gen X lawyers, couldn’t resist asking two questions.
“Do you think you could have drafted the MOU on your own?”
“If you rely on AI to do the drafting, how will you develop your drafting skills?”
Having successfully plunged my young colleague into an existential crisis (as all supervising lawyers should), I turned to the MOU. It required very few changes. AI had done the heavy lifting, saving us valuable time while leaving the questions I had posed unanswered.
I am old enough to be aware of a time before computers, before online legal databases, when lawyers dictated complex legal documents to stenographers typing away on manual typewriters. Every page had to be meticulously read and re-read, and every mistake corrected by hand before the draft could be sent to the client.
By today’s standards, the process sounds painfully slow and undeniably inefficient. Yet it demanded a remarkable level of discipline. It produced lawyers who possessed an extraordinary command of the law, exceptional drafting skills, and enviable vocabularies. They understood the significance of every word, every comma, and every semicolon they dictated. Precision was not merely desirable, it was essential, because correcting mistakes was laborious, time-consuming, and often impractical.
I joined the profession at a time when the typewriter was already a relic of the past. Yet I spent countless hours having my work reviewed by senior lawyers who would comb through my drafts, cutting and stitching sentences like surgeons, relentlessly questioning the legal basis of every proposition, challenging every assumption, and pushing me to think harder, research deeper, draft better, and develop the judgment that perhaps no template or technology can ever replace.
And perhaps this is where the real challenge lies. The concern is not that AI will replace lawyers; it is that overreliance on AI may stunt the development of the very skills that define a good lawyer.
This is why the legal profession must approach AI adoption thoughtfully.
Legal judgment, especially creativity in legal judgment, is forged through the process of grappling with ambiguity, questioning assumptions, making mistakes, defending positions, and learning from rigorous feedback. If AI increasingly performs the thinking before a young lawyer has learned how to think through a problem independently, there is a risk that efficiency will come at the expense of professional growth.
There is also the fundamental question of accuracy. An inexperienced lawyer may not have the ability to assess whether the output generated through an AI prompt is correct, complete, or legally sound. AI-generated responses often require careful scrutiny, challenge, and testing. It is not uncommon for an AI system, when its assumptions are questioned or its analysis is tested, to refine its response or arrive at an entirely different conclusion.
That process of interrogation requires something AI itself cannot provide: experience, legal knowledge, and professional judgment.
We have all encountered the sometimes-absurd results produced by AI hallucinations. Unsurprisingly, even leading organisations around the world have fallen victim to fabricated citations, inaccurate data, or non-existent references generated by AI systems. The lesson is not that AI lacks value, but that its output must always remain subject to informed human scrutiny.
It is precisely for these reasons that some law schools are beginning to rethink how students engage with technology. For example, as per reports, the University of Chicago Law School has prohibited the use of laptops and other electronic devices in many first-year classes, encouraging students to engage directly with the text, their notes, and the discussion rather than relying on technology. The objective is not to reject innovation, but to ensure that students first develop the habits of careful reading, critical analysis, and independent reasoning before technology becomes an aid rather than a crutch. Other law schools are embracing AI and teaching it as a necessary skill.
The ideal approach, in my view, lies somewhere in the middle.
The ability to read, understand, interpret, apply, and, where appropriate, challenge complex legal texts has always distinguished exceptional lawyers. Those abilities, in my view, cannot be downloaded, automated, or generated at the click of a button. They are developed through years of disciplined study, rigorous drafting, thoughtful supervision, and the humility to learn from mistakes.
After all, clients do not ultimately pay lawyers for perfectly formatted documents. They seek a trusted adviser who can understand complexity, challenge assumptions, and develop creative solutions where the law provides no clear answer. AI may transform how lawyers work, but those qualities remain at the heart of the profession and, may I submit, remain uniquely human.
As for my young colleague, he must learn that lawyering was, is, and will always remain a craft. And, like every true craftsman, the quality of your craft will only ever be measured by the dedication, discipline, and care you bring to perfecting it.
Fareed Yaldram
The writer is a Barrister-at-Law and Head of the Corporate / M&A Practice at Feras Al Shawaf Law Firm in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
