How will we train juniors if they're no longer doing doc review?

Repetitive, drudge work is under attack.

Juniors don’t want to do it. Clients don’t want to pay for it. Outsourcing companies want to steal it. Tech vendors want to automate it.

Older practitioners often look back on the low-level, routine tasks they used to do and say that they were  an important part of their training. They’re not wrong. Reading through thousands of contracts as part of a due diligence process will make you better at reading contracts. It might not be the most efficient or enjoyable way to learn, but it will make you better.

So if we end up in a world where this sort of work is no longer done by juniors within law firms, how will those juniors learn?

Richard and Daniel Susskind have suggested three methods:¹

1. Revert to the apprenticeship model
2. Have juniors manually perform a sample of the work being done by technology or other providers
3. Deliver training through e-learning

All of these seem reasonable, but let’s take a more critical look. What are the pros and cons of each, and where do the challenges and opportunities lie?

The apprenticeship model

Pros

We know the apprenticeship model works.

As Susskind says:

Feedback from a wide rage of professionals with whom we engaged suggests that, once young aspirants have secured their formal qualifications, then there is no better way to learn any trade in question than by sitting at the feet of a seasoned practitioner.²

The practice of law cannot be reduced to a mechanical, step-by-step production line. There’s very rarely only one correct answer or way to do something. It’s highly contextual and nuanced. All of this lends itself well to a highly tailored, one-to-one apprenticeship model.

Until legal work is completely automated and there’s no longer any need for human lawyers, learning by working directly under a supervisor will remain the gold standard.

We also shouldn’t forget the other big advantage the apprenticeship model has over the other methods proposed by Susskind: firms can charge for it, because the junior is doing real work for a real client.

Cons

Anybody who’s ever had to train up juniors will know it’s a lot of work. And supervisors are already pressed for time. When forced to choose between giving detailed comments on a junior’s draft versus executing the client work that was due yesterday, we all know which one is going to win.

The other issue is that not all supervisors are good supervisors. Some struggle with how to delegate, others struggle with giving constructive feedback. Within a law firm environment, this can result in highly variable learning experiences for juniors depending on the supervisor they’ve been allocated.

Duplicating work done by machines

Pros

Historically, part of junior lawyers’ training would involve doing months of relatively basic, repetitive grunt work like document review or due diligence. And while people do learn through this process, what Susskind’s research found is insightful:

In the course of our consulting work we have spoken to aspiring young professionals in many disciplines and invited their views. Commonly they have responded that they are able to grasp many of the tasks they undertake in the name of training after a handful of experiences, and that many months of repetition were unnecessary: ‘we get it after a couple of days; we don’t need to do this for a couple of years.’³

Assuming the high volume, repetitive work will in the future be entirely performed by machines (or other providers), having juniors manually do a representative sample of that work in parallel could prove to be a useful way to provide them with the same ‘hands-on’ learning benefit without having to crush their souls along the way. This would also be relatively low-effort compared to other simulated training experiences, since we can avoid the otherwise significant time and effort required to design a simulation from scratch.

Cons

While the documents being reviewed might be real, juniors know that manually duplicating the work of a machine is a contrived task - it’s like asking juniors to add up numbers in a spreadsheet using pen and paper, while the senior associates use an Excel formula. As a result, the exercise suffers from the same key problem as all formal training programs - it won’t be treated as seriously, and will always be pushed aside when there’s actual ‘real work’ to do.

Can we say it’s real work by using it as a form of quality control on the technology’s output? Maybe, but by this stage we’re assuming the technology is more accurate than junior lawyers, which is why we’re comfortable letting it take primary carriage of the task in the first place. As Susskind notes, ‘in contrast with today, no longer will recipients of professional services be willing to pay for this parallel learning process’.⁴ Or to put it another way, clients won’t see that any value is being added to the matter by this manual duplication of work.

E-learning

Pros

People often complain that training is boring and irrelevant. Technology may well provide the key to unlocking this problem.

Continuing advancements in areas such as generative AI and augmented/virtual reality will likely make possible sophisticated simulations and other learning experiences that we can’t even imagine today. Micro-learning, delivered automatically at the precise moment when a lawyer needs it, is just one example of how technology might be utilised to overcome challenges that have historically hampered traditional training initiatives.

E-learning can also be more intentional and less ad-hoc. With the apprenticeship model or manually duplicating work done by machines, your learning is limited to what comes up on the particular matter you’re working on. From my own personal experience, this meant having a concerning knowledge gap around derivatives contracts for the first 4 years of my career as a banking & finance lawyer, simply because that work was never allocated to me. On the other hand, e-learning enables a firm to track juniors’ learning profiles and ensure they have a well-rounded base of knowledge appropriate for their practice area and seniority.

Cons

Designing, building and rolling out e-learning is time consuming and expensive. It’s not helped that many areas of legal practice are quite niche, hindering the scalability of e-learning or otherwise limiting the depth of that training in an effort to make it more widely applicable across the practice areas.

And while new technologies are often exciting, they also come with risk. Will they work? Will they be effective? Will people want to use it? Will time-poor lawyers under constant pressure from clients think the e-learning is as exciting as the learning & development team does?

The value may well be there if the e-learning succeeds, but if it doesn’t, then that’s potentially a very large investment down the drain.

What does all this mean?

When we think about technology replacing drudge legal work and how that will impact training, there’s a tendency to gravitate towards technology as also being the solution. There’s no doubt that e-learning has plenty of potential, but it’s also expensive and can often be high risk.

Mundane training exercises like asking associates to do certain basic tasks manually, despite machines being able to do them automatically, are far less glamorous but come with the advantage of being relatively cheap to run and having a track record of effectiveness.

Above everything else though, traditional one-to-one supervision will still be where the most important learning takes place. It’s not perfect, but addressing its imperfections by looking at ways to help supervisors become better teachers, and juniors to become better learners, is something smart firms are already doing. We know the apprenticeship model works, and leaning into it should not be overlooked.

‍

References:

(1) Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, 'The Future of the Professions' (OUP, 2015) 260-1.

(2) Ibid 260.

(3) Ibid 259-60.

(4) Ibid 261.