I am currently in law school and will be completing my degree within the next year. With AI increasingly being used for legal research, drafting, due diligence and several other aspects of legal work, I am wondering what skills I should focus on developing before I graduate.
I don’t want to spend my remaining time learning skills that may become less valuable as technology changes. I would instead like to develop practical skills that can genuinely make me more useful to a law firm, company or other legal employer and help me stand out when I start looking for jobs.
What skills would you recommend law students learn in the current AI-driven legal industry, and where can I learn or develop these skills effectively before graduating?
Hi,
The rise of AI does not make traditional legal skills less important; if anything, it makes having a strong legal foundation more important. AI can assist with research, drafting, summarisation and due diligence, but a lawyer still has to identify the right legal issue, ask the right questions, assess whether the information generated is accurate, exercise legal judgment and ultimately take responsibility for the advice given. Therefore, I would not recommend that law students abandon the fundamentals in favour of trying to become “AI experts”
The first priority should remain legal research, drafting and analytical reasoning. A student should be able to independently understand a statute, read a judgment critically, identify the ratio, distinguish precedents and apply the law to a given set of facts. Similarly, drafting skills- whether of pleadings, contracts, opinions, research notes or correspondence- remain extremely valuable. AI can produce a first draft, but producing a good final draft requires an understanding of the law, facts, strategy, language and the client’s objective.
At the same time, students should become AI-literate. This does not necessarily mean learning how to code or becoming an AI engineer. It means understanding what AI tools can and cannot do, how to give precise instructions, how to verify AI-generated research, how to identify hallucinations and incorrect citations, and how to use AI as an aid rather than an authority. A particularly important skill will be knowing when not to rely on AI. Confidentiality, privilege, data protection and the firm’s internal policies also need to be considered before putting client information into any external AI tool.
Another area students should focus on is communication. Clear writing, concise emails, effective presentations, negotiation, advocacy and the ability to explain complicated legal issues to a non-lawyer are skills that technology cannot easily substitute. In practice, clients generally do not need a lawyer to tell them everything that the law says; they need someone who can tell them what the law means for them and what they should do next.
Students should therefore use AI as a learning and productivity tool, rather than as a replacement for learning. For example, after independently researching a legal issue, AI can be used to test one’s understanding, identify counterarguments, structure a note or suggest questions that may have been overlooked. Similarly, a student can compare an AI-generated draft with their own draft and analyse why one is better. Used in this manner, AI can accelerate learning rather than weaken foundational skills.
Ultimately, I would not advise students to try to predict which specific legal skills AI will make obsolete. Technology will continue to evolve, and the tools that are popular today may be very different a few years from now. Instead, develop skills that remain valuable regardless of the technology being used: sound legal reasoning, excellent drafting, attention to detail, commercial understanding, communication, judgment and professional responsibility. Then learn to use technology to perform those functions more efficiently. The lawyers who are likely to stand out in an AI-driven profession will not necessarily be those who know the most about AI, but those who know how to combine technology with sound legal judgment.
