This article is based on a LinkedIn post that generated over 40,000 impressions and dozens of substantive comments from lawyers, educators, and technologists across the country.
When I told a room full of lawyers that I used artificial intelligence to prepare for a hearing, the reactions split cleanly into three camps: enthusiasm, skepticism, and fear. What surprised me was how few people fell into the fourth and most important category — curiosity about how to do it right.
A LinkedIn post I published recently about this experience generated over 40,000 impressions and dozens of substantive comments from lawyers, educators, and technologists. The engagement confirmed something I had suspected: the legal profession is not debating whether to use AI anymore. It is debating how. And the practitioners who can answer that question with specificity — not theory — are the ones the profession is listening to.
What I Did
Before a recent hearing in a commercial litigation matter, I used AI tools to analyze the opposing party’s motion papers, identify the strongest case law supporting our position, and draft a preliminary outline of my oral argument. Then I spent two hours doing what AI cannot do: refining the analysis with courtroom experience, testing arguments against the judge’s known tendencies, and making strategic choices about emphasis and sequencing.
The result: I walked into court better prepared than three times the traditional prep time would have allowed. My client received a favorable ruling.
What I Did Not Do
I did not let AI write my brief. I did not cite a single case without reading it myself. I did not use AI as a substitute for legal judgment. And I absolutely did not submit anything to a court without verifying every citation, every quotation, and every factual assertion.
This distinction — between AI as accelerant and AI as replacement — is the entire conversation. And the legal profession’s failure to articulate it clearly is creating unnecessary fear on one side and reckless adoption on the other.
The Framework
The framework I use is straightforward. AI handles the compression work: initial research, pattern identification, first-draft organization, and issue spotting across large document sets. The lawyer handles the judgment work: strategic prioritization, contextual analysis, ethical evaluation, and the thousand small decisions that turn legal research into effective advocacy.
The client benefits because they get more preparation, better strategy, and lower costs — not because the lawyer did less work, but because the work was allocated more intelligently.
The Risks Are Real
AI hallucinates citations. It misses contextual nuance. It can produce confident-sounding analysis that is substantively wrong. These are not theoretical concerns — they have produced sanctionable conduct in federal courts, most notably in Mata v. Avianca, where counsel submitted AI-generated citations to cases that did not exist.
Every lawyer using AI tools must internalize a simple rule: if you did not verify it, you did not do your job. The New York State Bar Association has issued guidance emphasizing that lawyers remain fully responsible for all work product, regardless of whether AI assisted in its preparation. AI does not change a lawyer’s ethical obligations — it changes the speed at which those obligations must be exercised.
The Generational Risk
What concerns me most is not the current generation of practitioners. Experienced lawyers have the judgment to evaluate AI output because they developed that judgment the hard way — through years of reading cases, writing briefs, making arguments, and learning from mistakes.
The real risk is generational. If junior lawyers lean on AI before they develop those foundational skills, we will produce a generation of practitioners who cannot tell when the machine is wrong. The legal profession will have outsourced its quality control to the very tools that require quality control.
This is why responsible AI adoption requires three things simultaneously: transparency about how AI is used, verification infrastructure that prevents unchecked output from reaching clients or courts, and training reform that ensures new lawyers develop critical thinking skills alongside AI proficiency.
Not Less Lawyering
The conversation has moved past whether to use AI. The question now is whether we will build the professional infrastructure to use it responsibly. I am optimistic, but only if practitioners are willing to share what works, what fails, and what they do not yet know.
The legal profession has always evolved by developing shared standards of practice. AI is no different — it just moves faster than anything we have standardized before.
Not less lawyering. Better lawyering. That is the standard, and it is one we can meet.
At Travis & DeBlase PLLC, our AI Enhanced General Counsel practice integrates AI into active litigation while maintaining the human oversight that clients and courts require. To learn more about our approach, schedule a consultation.