Making AI Headlines · Page 5
Junior Lawyers Improve With AI, but Learning Is Uneven
· New York time
A three-month field experiment involving 133 patent attorneys found that AI improved immediate performance, with junior lawyers gaining the most. When assistance was removed, only senior attorneys retained the benefits, suggesting that existing expertise helps turn assisted work into lasting skill. The result separates two things a busy workplace can easily combine in a single productivity chart: producing better work today and becoming independently better at the work tomorrow. A junior attorney's improved output during the experiment does not, by itself, show that the same improvement will survive without the tool. For firms training new lawyers, the finding creates a tension between immediate production and professional development. It suggests that simply exposing a junior employee to capable assistance may not reproduce the learning that experienced colleagues can extract from it. The experiment offers evidence about that tension, not a universal forecast for every profession or training arrangement. The office can now have a beautifully drafted document and a much less settled answer to who learned how to draft it. The performance review may need two columns: work completed and knowledge retained. This is awkward for organizations accustomed to measuring the first with software and the second with an encouraging nod near the elevators.
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