What Legal Leaders Want Law Students to Know About Using AI
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It’s long been a given that legal professionals have to muscle through long hours of manual, tedious document review. That meeting client demands requires sacrificing any semblance of work-life balance. That burnout is a given if you want to practice law or pursue a legal career in corporate.
That’s no longer true.
AI challenges these previously-given truths of our profession. Yes, artificial intelligence can speed up your work and automate manual tasks. But that’s not what makes it exciting for legal professionals. What it really does is give you a chance to pursue more meaningful, strategic, exciting legal work…instead of staying mired in endless back-and-forth reviews.
AI use has become more widespread in the industry, too. When we surveyed over 800 legal professionals for our 2025 State of AI in Legal Report, we found that 69% use AI for tasks like summarizing case law, reviewing documents for litigation, or flagging risky contract clauses.
Source: State of AI in Legal Report, Ironclad
Today’s legal leaders understand that it’s less that their teams are using AI, and more how they’re using it. For example, more than two-thirds of the folks we surveyed told us it helps them communicate more easily with their stakeholders.
AI can be an incredibly useful tool for your practice. Here’s how to use it responsibly:
Follow your firm’s internal policies on AI usage first and foremost
Every organization has a different opinion on what kind of AI use is appropriate. When we asked legal professionals to clue us in on what AI use looks like in their organization, the results were mixed. The majority (58%) have policies in place that guide employee use. This is more true for corporate teams, suggesting corporate settings prioritize structured technology management, adherence to security postures, and collaboration with IT departments.
Source: State of AI in Legal Report, Ironclad
Before you add ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini into your daily workflow, be sure to confirm with your team where they fall. This includes:
- What tools are approved for use, and how your leaders expect you to use them (or not)
- What policies are in place to protect client confidentiality and data from each tool
- Whether or not you’re measured on your AI usage
Only 17% of our respondents reported no governance whatsoever on AI usage. If that’s your organization, you may need to start the conversation on governance, boundaries, and how to protect client confidentiality. It’s worth noting that in the U.S., federal courts ruled in United States v. Heppner that documents and chats created using a non-enterprise, open AI platform did not fall under attorney-client privilege.
Remember: AI is a tool, not a way to outsource thinking
Once you understand what’s allowed in terms of AI usage, it’s time to start incorporating it into your workflow. Legal professionals use AI to automate manual tasks like document or contract review, conduct high-level research, draft legal documents, or accelerate their written correspondence with their team.
If you’re just getting started, a great place to begin is to run a document you’ve written through AI for first-pass issue spotting, or to help you draft questions or create a memo outline. As you become more comfortable and familiar with these tools, you can do more.
Source: State of AI in Legal Report, Ironclad
While AI is incredibly useful for your day-to-day tasks, remember: It does not replace your human thought and judgment. It’s meant as a tool to assist you in these tasks, not replace them.
The better the input, the better the output. That means doing preliminary prepwork and research in your own thought process before turning to AI for help. (We’ll talk more about prompt engineering and asking better questions in a moment.)
No matter what, though, the lawyer is who decides what to do with that information. AI can offer suggestions on a path forward—or craft a compelling message or clause—but it’s you, the human in the system, that ultimately chooses what to do with that output. Because it’s you who hold your client’s or stakeholder’s trust, not AI.
Double- and triple-check any AI output
Beyond security concerns, what holds most legal professionals back from adopting AI is accuracy. When you’re interacting with generative AI in particular, it can be hard to remember that right now, “intelligence” is a misnomer—AI can’t think the way humans can. What it does is put language together that usually goes together, mimicking human speech. This is why it’s prone to “hallucinations” or use so much jargon that it can sound great, but it’s not actually saying anything.
Source: State of AI in Legal Report, Ironclad
The good news is that with every version of generative AI that gets released, this problem gets better. In the meantime, though, you’ll want to fact-check sources on anything client-facing or important, like cases, citations, or dates, and read through any outputs with a critical eye.
More of an issue than hallucinations, though, is that if you’re using a more general AI tool, it’s going to miss your unique business context or brand voice. The best way to get around this is to work with your IT department to build a customized version of one of these tools, that gets business-specific training; another way to solve this issue is to use software that leverages domain-specific AI, which collects and trains on context and relevant detail that is specific to a particular org or business, making it more actionable than what a generic AI tool could output.
How to use AI to make your work better, not just faster
It’s well-known that AI can speed up your workflow. But your leaders don’t just want you to work faster, sacrificing quality in the process. Done right, AI can make your work faster and better.
Source: State of AI in Legal Report, Ironclad
Take the contract lifecycle, for example. AI can automate some of the most time-consuming aspects of this process, like review. But it can also offer tailored recommendations on your contracts to deliver better business results, organize a contract or performance analysis, summarize your meetings with clear, next-step action items, and give you a cleaner first draft to start with.
The way to make your work better, and not just faster, is through how you ask questions. Telling AI to “tell me what’s important” or “summarize this transcript” can be useful, but it’s not the same as teaching AI what’s relevant for the analysis you need. To do this:
- Frame the issue at hand by giving AI details like the type of case, your role, and your goal from the conversation
- Include source material to compare and learn from, like transcripts or documents
- Specify the format you want the summary or analysis to come back as, such as bullet points or key takeaways
- Err on the side of adding more detail, not less
- Follow up to clarify the task. It may take a few back-and-forth for the AI to generate what you’re looking for, or help you drill down to what you really need
Think of how you would explain a task to an intern or entry-level assistant conducting this type of task for the first time. That will give you a much better prompt than using AI as a glorified search engine.
Show your reasoning every time you use it
If you’re going to use AI in your arguments or for your corporate work, show your reasoning. Disclose the specific tools you’ve used anytime you use them, and make sure to include a record of what you asked, any fact-checking or tweaking you did, and how you reached your own conclusion based on the data from your own research and AI.
That does two things:
- As an intellectual exercise, it ensures you’re thinking critically about the outputs from artificial intelligence and that you’re truly checking all of the facts before continuing
- It builds trust with your clients and your team that you’re not just blindly using AI but are using your own judgment alongside it
This isn’t meant to be defensive or a CYA kind of exercise. Just as you would disclose which analytics tool you’re using for a dashboard or your legal precedents you’re pulling for a case, do the same with artificial intelligence.
When not to use AI
57% of legal professionals report being more strategic when they use AI to replace rote or mundane tasks in their legal workflow. And AI can be an incredibly valuable tool:
Source: State of AI in Legal Report, Ironclad
However, you should not replace AI with every single task just yet. Highly sensitive matters, high-stakes decisions, or cases with too much speculation requires a lot more nuance than AI can produce at this time. AI is primarily a data-driven tool, and so when there’s too much subjectivity—or not enough data—it’s going to end up guessing more than giving you solid recommendations.
The same goes through for any final legal decisions without a human reviewing them. As we mentioned above, always check your work.
The best lawyers will use AI as a tool, not as a replacement for legal judgment
AI isn’t the magic solution to every problem lawyers face in the industry. There will still probably be demanding clients, long hours, and difficult situations you’ll have to face. But adopting it as a tool can be a game-changer for your career growth. Instead of worrying over whether or not AI will replace you, you can use it to build a more sustainable, more strategic legal career. In fact, when we asked legal professionals, almost half (46%) of legal professionals believe AI creates more career opportunities, not fewer.
Source: State of AI in Legal Report, Ironclad
Do this by building the habits that legal leaders notice: Curiosity, ownership, responsiveness. You can use AI to practice your communication skills or work through challenging ideas to hone your legal judgment. When it really comes down to it, the lawyers who stand out in the industry are going to use AI to sharpen their legal acumen—and work more efficiently than their peers who don’t.
Learn more about how real legal professionals are using AI in their day-to-day workflow with the Legal AI Handbook.
Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney.
