For the Young Practitioner

You are worried about the wrong thing.

If you are a pupil, a young attorney, or a newly-minted advocate — someone with a law degree, a practising certificate, and the persistent suspicion that you do not yet know what you are doing — you have probably heard a great deal about artificial intelligence replacing lawyers.

That is not your anxiety. Not really.

Your fear is subtler. You are not worried that AI will replace you. You are worried that it will prevent you from becoming the lawyer you want to become.

Will you actually learn anything, or merely learn to operate a search engine? Will you build genuine expertise, or a career on sand? Will you develop the instincts that distinguish the master from the mechanic — or remain, forever, someone who knows how to ask questions but not how to evaluate answers?

These are legitimate concerns. They deserve a serious response.

I. The Library You Were Promised But Never Given

Senior lawyers speak fondly of "learning the library." They remember long afternoons pulling volumes from shelves, discovering cases by accident, building their mental map of the law through the physical act of inhabiting it.

What they forget to mention is that they had time.

They had years of slow apprenticeship, research assignments with generous deadlines, partners who understood that a junior needed to disappear into the stacks for a week to truly understand a problem. They had the luxury of inefficiency — and that inefficiency was, in truth, education.

That economy is gone.

Billing pressures have compressed learning time to almost nothing. The junior lawyer today is expected to find the answer, not to discover it. There is no time for serendipitous browsing, for the productive accident of finding one case while searching for another.

AskLex is not a shortcut around the library. It is the library access your predecessors had and you have been denied. It returns to you the possibility of encountering the law broadly, of seeing connections across domains, of finding in minutes what would otherwise take days you do not have.

The seniors had time. You have tools. The destination is the same.

II. The Difference Between Finding and Understanding

Here is what artificial intelligence does: it finds. It retrieves. It pattern-matches. It can locate, with remarkable speed, the statute you half-remember, the case that eluded your search, the precedent buried in the archives of 1887.

Here is what it cannot do: comprehend.

When Lex surfaces a case, you still have to read it. You still have to understand why it matters, how it fits into the architecture of the law, how subsequent courts have treated it, whether its reasoning applies to your facts or merely appears to. You still have to extract the ratio from the obiter, the principle from the dicta, the holding from the noise.

The finding was never the education. The thinking about what you found — that was always the education. That part has not changed.

A surgeon who uses a laparoscopic camera still performs the surgery. The tool gives access; the skill performs the work. The medical student who trains with modern imaging does not become a lesser surgeon than one who trained without it. They become a surgeon who can see more.

You are not outsourcing your legal education to a machine. You are using a machine to see more law, more quickly, than any previous generation could see. What you do with what you see remains entirely up to you.

III. The Calibration Problem

Now let us address your real concern honestly, because it deserves honesty.

You worry that you do not yet have the experience to know when the AI is wrong. A senior practitioner would feel it in their bones — would sense when a result was off, when a case did not quite fit. You do not have those bones yet.

This is true. And it is legitimate.

But consider what Lex actually gives you. It does not give you summaries to trust blindly. It does not give you conclusions to copy. It gives you primary sources — the actual judgment, the actual statute, the actual words of the actual law.

You must still read them. You must still understand them. And in that reading and understanding, you develop precisely the calibration you fear you lack.

Read the cases. Check the citations. Notice when something feels wrong, and investigate that feeling. You will be mistaken often at first. You will learn. This is how expertise develops — not by avoiding tools, but by using them critically.

IV. What Your Seniors Will Not Tell You

They used tools too.

The generation that now speaks sceptically of artificial intelligence embraced Westlaw and LexisNexis when those platforms arrived. The generation before them thought computerised research was not "real lawyering." The generation before that was suspicious of the photocopier. The generation before that viewed the typewriter as a threat to proper legal drafting.

Every generation laments that the next has it too easy, conveniently forgetting the tools that made their own careers possible.

Your seniors learned to be lawyers with the help of technologies their seniors distrusted. You will learn with the help of technologies your seniors distrust. In twenty years, you will probably distrust whatever the juniors are using then.

The question is not whether to use the tools available to you. The question is whether to use them well.

V. The Steep Part of the Curve

You are at the most important moment in your professional development.

Research on expertise — across domains from chess to surgery to law — consistently shows that the early years matter disproportionately. The mental architecture you build now, the patterns you learn to recognise, the frameworks you develop for organising legal knowledge — these compound for the rest of your career.

Without tools, you might research fifty cases this year. With tools, you might research five hundred. Same reading skills. Same analytical work. Same development of judgment. But ten times the exposure to the patterns of the law.

Volume matters for expertise. Lex gives you volume you could not otherwise have. Use it while you are on the steep part of the learning curve.

VI. The Real Risk

Let us name the actual danger, because there is one.

The danger is not using AI. The danger is outsourcing your thinking to AI.

If you ask Lex a question and copy the answer without reading the sources, you have learned nothing and risked everything. You have not developed judgment. You have not built expertise. You have merely created the appearance of competence — and appearances, in law, eventually collapse under the weight of reality.

But if you ask Lex a question, read the cases it surfaces, trace the reasoning through the judgments, understand how the principles apply to your facts, and form your own view — you have done in two hours what used to take two days. You have learned as much as your predecessors learned. You have simply learned it faster.

The risk is laziness, not technology. The tool does not determine how you use it. You do.

VII. Your Competitive Advantage

Here is something the anxious professional literature does not mention:

Some of your seniors will not touch this technology. Professional pride, technological discomfort, the conviction that anything new must be inferior — whatever the reason, a meaningful portion of the senior bar will avoid AI tools entirely.

You will not.

In ten years, you will be the practitioner who combines deep expertise with masterful use of these tools. Your seniors who avoided AI will have one advantage. You will have both.

This is not small. This is the difference between the surgeon who operates by feel alone and the surgeon who operates by feel and has access to imaging technology. Both may be skilled. One can see more.

Do not apologise for this advantage. Develop it consciously, systematically, seriously. It will define your career.

VIII. A Tool That Grows With You

What Lex does for you today is not what it will do for you in twenty years.

Today, Lex helps you find what you do not yet know exists. It shows you the landscape of the law in areas where you have no mental map. It answers the question every junior is embarrassed to ask: "Where do I even start?"

In five years, Lex becomes a research accelerator. You will know enough to ask sophisticated questions, and the tool will help you answer them in minutes rather than hours.

In twenty years, Lex becomes leverage. You will have the judgment of a senior practitioner — the instinct, the pattern recognition, the wisdom of decades — combined with research capabilities your predecessors never imagined.

The relationship between lawyer and tool evolves over a career. But it must begin early to develop fully.

IX. What Remains

The purely mechanical work of legal research — the hours spent searching indices, scanning headnotes, pulling volumes — that work is diminishing. The junior lawyer of 2050 will not spend their time as the junior lawyer of 1990 did.

But consider what remains. Consider what no machine can touch.

Standing before a judge and reading the room. Sitting with a client facing ruin and helping them decide whether to fight or settle. Constructing an argument that moves from premise to conclusion with the force of genuine thought. Exercising judgment in conditions of uncertainty. Persuading, advising, counselling, strategising.

These are not tasks. These are acts of advocacy. They are irreducibly human.

The mechanical work was never the point. It was the price of admission — paid because you had to, not because it made you a lawyer. The thinking, the judgment, the wisdom: that was always what made you a lawyer.

That work remains. It will always remain.

X. A Final Word

You will become a real lawyer.

Not despite these tools, but in part because of them. Not by avoiding the technology your profession distrusts, but by using it in service of genuine learning, genuine expertise, genuine judgment.

The lawyers who thrive in the coming decades will not be those who avoided AI. They will be those who used it seriously, critically, honestly — in service of becoming, irreplaceably, lawyers.

The finding was never the magic. The thinking was.

Lex handles the archaeology. You remain — as you must become — the architect.

The archive awaits. The thinking, and the becoming, remain yours ෴