Is the Legal Profession Ready to Win the AI Race? America’s AI Action Plan Has Fired the Starting Gun — from denniskennedy.com by Dennis Kennedy
The Starting Gun for Legal AI Has Fired. Who in Our Profession is on the Starting Line?
The legal profession’s “wait and see” approach to artificial intelligence is now officially obsolete.
This isn’t hyperbole. This is a direct consequence of the White House’s new “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan.” …This is the starting gun for a race that will define the next fifty years of our profession, and I’m concerned that most of us aren’t even in the stadium, let alone in the starting blocks.
If the Socratic Method truly means anything, isn’t it time we applied its rigorous questioning to ourselves? We must question our foundational assumptions about the billable hour, the partnership track, our resistance to new forms of legal service delivery, and the very definition of what it means to be “practice-ready” in the 21st century. What do our clients, our students, and users of the legal system need?
The AI Action Plan forces a fundamental re-imagining of our industry’s core jobs.
The New Job of Legal Education: Producing AI-Capable Counsel
The plan’s focus on a “worker-centric approach” is a direct challenge to legal academia. The new job of legal education is no longer just to teach students how to think like a lawyer, but how to perform as an AI-augmented one. This means producing graduates who are not only familiar with the law but are also capable of leveraging AI tools to deliver legal services more efficiently, ethically, and effectively. Even more importnat, it means we must develop lawyers who can give the advice needed to individuals and companies already at work trying to win the AI race.