# Will AI Replace Junior Lawyers at Your Firm? > AI now writes much of a junior associate's first draft, but it cannot prove it. Keep hiring juniors, train them to check every claim in an AI draft, and size next year's class from your own time entries. By Vlad Shvets, Partner @ Qvery · Published 2026-11-01 · Updated 2026-11-01 · 16 min read Canonical: https://qvery.ai/blog/will-ai-replace-lawyers/ A law firm of a few hundred people runs on its first- and second-year associates turning a partner's instruction into a first draft: the research memo, the discovery responses, the deposition summary, the medical chronology, the markup of the other side's contract. Clients pay for those hours, and the same hours are how a law graduate becomes a lawyer you can put in front of a client. An AI assistant can now write a passable first version of much of that work in minutes, so the size of next year's associate class has become a question for the partners. The short version: AI takes **the junior's first draft**, not the junior. Every AI draft still needs a lawyer who can tell a true statement of law from a plausible one, and that judgment is built by writing drafts and defending them. So keep hiring juniors, move their first two years from writing drafts to checking and defending them, and size the class from **your own time entries**, not from what the largest firms say they expect. Below: where AI drafting stops, how to train juniors and size the class around it, and how we set up the drafting agent and its check for law firms. Most hiring figures below come from firms of more than 500 lawyers and several are intentions rather than results, and the conduct rules cited are the ABA's model versions: your state's adopted rules decide. ## AI Can Write the First Draft but Cannot Tell You Whether It Is True A partner who signs a brief is trusting dozens of small claims they did not check themselves: this happened, according to that exhibit; the law is this, according to that case, at that page. A first draft is a **stack of those claims**. Writing it produces them. Checking it means opening every source and confirming it says what the draft says it says, which is a different job from writing, and the one the partner is relying on. An assistant is fast at the first job and unreliable at the second, and its mistakes **look like correct work**. When Stanford researchers tested the AI research tools from LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters on hard research questions in 2024, the tools gave false or misleading answers **between 17% and 33%** of the time. The errors read like competent work: a rule stated as good law, with a citation to the case that overruled it; one doctrine described with a case about another; a defendant's argument reported as the court's holding. Supervisors describe the same failure in juniors' AI drafts now: **real cases**, cited for things they do not say. It is reaching courts with lawyers' names on it, too. A public database that tracks court decisions dealing with AI-fabricated material held 2,247 of them on 31 October 2026; in **897** a lawyer, a prosecutor, or a paralegal was among those responsible, and 505 of those came in 2026, against 360 in all of 2025. Here is where the line falls in the work juniors do: **Where the line falls in a junior's first-draft work** | The junior's task | What the assistant can draft | What a lawyer still has to check | |---|---|---| | Research memo | The issue, the authorities, the argument | Each case says what the memo says, at the page cited, and is still good law | | Discovery responses | Answers and objections from the requests and the file | Each answer matches the client's documents; each objection is one the firm makes | | [Deposition summary](https://qvery.ai/blog/deposition-summary-ai/) | A page-and-line digest of the testimony | Each line matches the transcript at the page and line cited | | [Medical chronology](https://qvery.ai/blog/medical-chronology-ai/) | A dated list of treatment from the records | Each entry traces to a page of the records, and nothing is missing between visits | | [Contract markup](https://qvery.ai/blog/nda-review-ai/) | Redlines against the firm's positions | Each change follows the client's instructions, and untouched clauses still hold up | ABA Formal Opinion 512 puts the consequence in one sentence: regardless of the level of review the lawyer selects, "the lawyer is fully responsible for the work on behalf of the client." ![Two columns. Before: the junior writes every claim and the partner's red pen finds the gaps. With an assistant: it drafts, the junior checks and defends each claim, the partner signs.](https://qvery.ai/blog/will-ai-replace-lawyers/illustration-who-proves-the-draft.webp) *Compare the second line of each column: the junior's writing becomes checking, and the partner still signs.* The same split, a draft the machine writes and a check a lawyer owns, runs through most of a firm's document work. AI agents for legal: https://qvery.ai/industries/legal/ ## When Juniors Cannot Check the Draft, the Check Moves Up to Whoever Signs ABA Model Rule 5.1 says who answers when a junior's draft is wrong: the partners must have measures that keep every lawyer within the rules, and a supervisor who knew of a violation in time to fix it answers for it. A federal judge in Alabama showed what that looks like in July 2025. Two filings by a large firm carried citations an AI tool had invented. She disqualified all three lawyers involved from the case: the partner who generated the citations and filed them without checking, and the two partners who had **signed the filings** without reviewing the citations. She declined to sanction the firm, finding it had "acted reasonably in its efforts to prevent this misconduct." Read that as the person running the firm: the lawyers who signed were taken off the case, and the firm's own measures were what protected it. And checking is not quick. Lawyers who review AI drafts put it at **about as long** as writing: an excellent draft saves maybe a quarter of the time, and a poor one costs a quarter more. A junior who cannot check hands that whole job back up the chain, and the extra hours land on whoever signs: double-checking everything. When [checking AI work takes as long as doing it](https://qvery.ai/blog/ai-verification-tax/), the usual fix is to narrow the job. In a law firm the sharper problem is that the checker is **the most expensive person** on the matter. [Hourly billing](https://qvery.ai/blog/ai-and-the-billable-hour/) makes the same point in money. Opinion 512 says a lawyer who bills by the hour bills actual time: the minutes spent giving the assistant the facts, and the time spent reviewing its draft for accuracy and completeness, not the hours the draft would have taken by hand. So the drafting hours the assistant removed are gone from the bill, and the checking is what is **left to bill**. It belongs with a junior who can do it, at a junior's rate. A firm whose juniors cannot check has lost the drafting revenue and moved the checking to partners, where each hour is either billed at a partner's rate for a junior's task, which the client will question, or written off, which costs the firm a partner's hour. ## Train Juniors on AI Drafts by Making Them Defend Every Claim Juniors used to learn to check by writing. A partner handed back the memo covered in red, the junior rewrote it, and the tenth turn taught what the first nine had missed. Oyango Snell, president and CEO of CLOC, remembers how that loop worked: > We had the one or two partners that we worked with a lot, and we put together memos, and they threw it back at us, with a bunch of red, and said, 'what the hell is this?' It made us better attorneys. > > Oyango Snell, President and CEO, CLOC The assistant skips those turns. When a partner's markup goes straight back into AI to make the changes, nobody learns anything from it. The fair objection is that juniors never learned judgment from cite-checking and fixing footnotes at midnight; they endured it. That holds for the formatting. It does not hold for checking a claim against its source. Deciding whether a case supports the sentence it is cited for is the judgment **the partner relies on** when they sign. Nobody has measured this for law. The nearest controlled test comes from programming. In a randomized trial Anthropic ran with 52 mostly junior software engineers learning a new library, those allowed an AI assistant scored **50%** on a test of what they had just used, against **67%** for those who worked by hand, and the widest gap was **on debugging**: finding what is wrong. Programmers are not lawyers, but finding what is wrong in a draft is the skill a supervising lawyer needs from a junior. The trial's other result points at the cure: the participants who used the assistant to ask for explanations while they worked, not only to produce the code, kept more of what they learned. Firms already expect the cost. In Thomson Reuters' 2026 survey, **71%** of law firm professionals said juniors still need experienced colleagues to build that judgment, and expect them to take **a year longer** to get there. The training I would put in place needs no training department, only the senior associates who already review juniors' work: 1. **Write first on anything new** A junior's first draft on an issue they have not worked before is written without the assistant, then put beside the assistant's version. What the assistant found that the junior missed is the lesson, and so is what the junior found that it missed. 2. **Build a claims table for every AI draft** Every statement of fact or law in the draft, the source it rests on with a pin cite, the passage quoted from that source, and the junior's verdict: supports it, supports part of it, does not, or not found. 3. **Add a column for what is missing** The adverse case nobody cited, the limiting sentence two paragraphs after the quoted one, the fact in the record the draft ignores, the argument it did not make. This column teaches judgment, because it cannot be filled from the draft. 4. **Defend three rows out loud** The senior associate who would have redlined the draft picks three rows, and the junior explains them without notes: why the source supports the claim, what the draft left out, and why it matters. The table review replaces the redline loop rather than adding to it: the same senior, the same draft, a different conversation. **It is training time**, and the firm should budget it as training rather than hide it in a client's bill. What changes is that **the junior does the checking**, and that it is graded. **Tips** > I asked him to pull every case cited in the brief with the proposition for which it was cited highlighted and send it to me (basically another layer of cite checking). > ([r/biglaw · Jan 2026](https://www.reddit.com/r/biglaw/comments/1qiftue/seniors_partners_lit_how_would_you_deal_with_a/o0reoko/)) > for every source cited in the next draft, they need to provide a copy of the case/statute that has the relevant passage highlighted so you can confirm the accuracy of the citation. > ([r/biglaw · Jan 2026](https://www.reddit.com/r/biglaw/comments/1qiftue/seniors_partners_lit_how_would_you_deal_with_a/o0rf1dc/)) > Tell them to make sure they write the brief first and then feed it to the AI. > ([r/biglaw · Jan 2026](https://www.reddit.com/r/biglaw/comments/1qiftue/seniors_partners_lit_how_would_you_deal_with_a/o0ra8h9/)) > with the wrong prompter in its eagerness to find a tidy answer, it misses things. The fourth year would know what got missed, but not the second year. > ([r/biglaw · Jun 2026](https://www.reddit.com/r/biglaw/comments/1uj4y4u/anyone_else_feel_like_ai_is_taking_over_entire/oukyri8/)) The table's skeleton is clerical, so an assistant can build it: given a draft and the sources it cites, it lays each statement beside the passage it rests on and leaves the verdicts blank, because **the verdicts are the training**. The junior opens every source to confirm the quoted passage is there (the assistant can misquote, too), writes a verdict on each row and what the draft leaves out, and brings the table to the review, the rows with no passage found first. ![One worked row: the draft says the court held a negligent delay violates due process; the cited passage is the defendant's argument; verdict, does not support; the court rejects it two pages on.](https://qvery.ai/blog/will-ai-replace-lawyers/illustration-one-row-worked.webp) *Invented for this page, on the error the Stanford study found: a party's argument reported as the court's holding.* The table also solves a problem supervisors keep raising: you cannot evaluate a junior whose work is the assistant's. **You can evaluate their verdicts.** It works only inside a rule the junior can follow. Opinion 512 says the lawyers who manage a firm must set clear policies on permissible AI use, and that supervising lawyers must make sure the people under them are trained on the tools they use. Thomson Reuters found **34%** of law firm professionals using AI tools their firm has not authorized. A firm this size can write the rule in a sentence, the way one boutique did: associates use the firm's licensed research AI with the supervising attorney's approval, and client material goes into nothing else. ## How Qvery Sets Up the Drafting Agent and the Check Beside It We build this for one firm at a time. The agent drafts from your own files (the pleadings, the discovery, the medical records, your precedent memos), and every draft arrives with its claims table already laid out, the verdict columns left for the associate. It works on autopilot inside the systems your lawyers already use: the document management system, the research database the firm licenses, the matter's shared folder. The build begins with how drafts move through your firm, and within two weeks a first version is drafting on one matter type. Then we train the associates who check its drafts and the seniors who review the tables. What we report weekly is **the drafting hours it saves** and **the errors the check catches** before a partner signs. Which of your juniors' hours it can take, and which checks stay with them, is a map we draw from your own time entries. Map Which of Your Juniors' Work an AI Can Draft: https://calendly.com/qvery-vlad/30min ## Size Next Year's Class From Your Own Time Entries, Not From Large Firms' Forecasts Firms of more than 500 lawyers hired about 540 fewer graduates of the Class of 2025 than of the class before, by NALP's count: a **7.5% fall** and their first since the Class of 2014. In a summer 2026 survey of 57 large firms by Citi's law firm group, two-thirds expected to have fewer first-years in 2028 than in 2025, and 19% said they did not know. **Read those as intentions.** Large-firm entry classes bottomed out three years after each of the last three hiring peaks, and those peaks came with recessions; the 2024 peak did not. Meanwhile demand for large firms' hours **rose 4.2%** in the first half of 2026, against a usual rate of about 1.5%, by Citi's count. At firms nearer your size the record points the other way. Firms of 101 to 250 lawyers hired **1,418 graduates** of the Class of 2025, seven more than the year before and **the most since 2008**. What the large firms do instead is hire laterals: **51%** of associate hires in the Am Law 200 in 2025. A lateral is a lawyer someone else trained, which works until every firm is shopping for the same ones. Here is the arithmetic, with invented numbers so you can see the steps; replace each one with yours. **Sizing the class: the example firm, with invented numbers** | Step | Example (invented numbers) | |---|---| | Hours your first- and second-years billed last year | 10 juniors at 1,800 hours: 18,000 | | Share of those hours on first drafts (tag the entries) | 40%: 7,200 | | Share of that drafting the assistant now does on your matters, measured over a quarter | Half: 3,600 freed | | Checking added back (the claims tables) | A third of what the assistant took: 1,200 | | Drafting kept by hand for training | 600 | | Hours freed | 3,600 less 1,200 less 600: 1,800 | | Growth in the hours clients buy | 4% of 18,000: 720 absorbed | | Net hours freed, in juniors at 1,800 hours each | 1,080: about 0.6 of a junior | Then hold the result against **the seniors you will need**: the partners and senior associates you expect to lose in the next five to seven years, and how many of each class usually stay that long. If the example firm needs four new seniors by then and keeps half of each class, it has to hire about eight juniors over those years, whatever the table says about this one. In the example, the assistant justifies **one fewer junior at most**, not the plunge the large-firm headlines describe. Your numbers will differ. The rule does not: cut the class only by the hours your entries show are gone after the checking, the training, and the growth in demand, and **never below the seniors** you will need. If the table shows hours freed, you have three ways to take them: a smaller class, the same class on more matters, or the checking moved to associates and paralegals you already have, which works only where they have the hours. Hiring laterals later is the fourth, at whatever price every other short firm is paying. The ruling reverses for one matter type when the assistant's drafts there need little correction for two quarters and **a senior's audit** of a sample of the drafts juniors passed finds them sound. Few corrections on their own can mean nobody looked hard. That is the same rule we would give any team an AI agent joins: [no cut until its record shows the work is gone](https://qvery.ai/blog/ai-layoffs/). Before the meeting where next year's class is set, export last year's first- and second-year time entries and **tag each one**: drafting the assistant now does, checking, or the rest. That list is the agenda. Plan the Rest of Your Firm's AI Work: https://calendly.com/qvery-vlad/30min ## Frequently asked questions ### Will AI replace lawyers? Not the lawyer who signs. AI now writes much of a junior associate's first draft, but every draft still needs a lawyer who can tell a true statement of law from a plausible one. What shrinks is the drafting, not the need for that judgment. ### Should we cut first-year hiring because of AI? Not on large firms' forecasts. Measure the drafting the assistant does on your matters for a quarter, add back the checking and the training, and cut only the hours left, never below the seniors you will need. Firms of 101 to 250 lawyers hired more Class of 2025 graduates than in any year since 2008. ### How accurate are AI legal research tools? Not accurate enough to file unchecked. In a 2024 Stanford test on hard research questions, the AI research tools from LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters gave false or misleading answers between 17% and 33% of the time, and the wrong answers read like competent work. ### Who is responsible when an AI draft is wrong? The lawyer who signs it, and the partners who supervise. ABA Model Rule 5.1 makes partners responsible for measures that keep the firm's lawyers within the rules, and Formal Opinion 512 says the lawyer is fully responsible for work done with AI. ### How long does it take to check an AI draft? Often about as long as writing it. An excellent draft saves maybe a quarter of the time and a poor one costs a quarter more. That is why the check belongs with a junior who can do it, not with the partner who signs. ### Can we bill clients for the hours AI saves? No. Under Formal Opinion 512 a lawyer who bills by the hour bills actual time: instructing the assistant and reviewing its draft, not the hours the draft would have taken by hand. The checking is what is left to bill. ### How should associates check AI drafts? Claim by claim. Every statement of fact or law gets its source, the passage it rests on, and a verdict, and the junior opens every source rather than trusting the assistant's quote. An assistant can lay out the table; the verdicts are the associate's. ### What is a claims table? A worksheet that lays every statement of fact or law in a draft beside the source it cites and the passage it rests on, with columns for the junior's verdict and for what the draft leaves out. An assistant can build the rows; the verdicts are the training. ### Which junior tasks still teach legal judgment? The ones where the junior decides something: whether a case supports the sentence it is cited for, what an adverse case does to the argument, what the record holds that the draft ignores. On any issue new to the junior, write the first draft by hand, then compare it with the assistant's. ### Should an associate be fired for one AI mistake? Treat it the way you would treat any unchecked work: the problem is the missing check, not the tool. A mistake the associate disclosed and the review caught is a training moment. Hiding it, or putting client material into an unapproved tool, is a different conversation, and one for the supervising partner. ### Are large firms hiring fewer first-year associates? Some are. Firms of more than 500 lawyers hired about 540 fewer graduates of the Class of 2025, a 7.5% fall, and many expect smaller classes. Firms of 101 to 250 lawyers hired 1,418, the most since 2008. ### When can a firm rely on AI drafts with lighter review? For one matter type at a time, once the drafts there have needed little correction for two quarters and a senior's audit of a sample finds the drafts juniors passed are sound. Few corrections on their own can mean nobody looked hard. ### Does our firm need a written AI policy? Yes. ABA Formal Opinion 512 says the lawyers who manage a firm must set clear policies on permissible use of generative AI, and a third of law firm professionals in Thomson Reuters' 2026 survey used tools their firm had not authorized. Start with one sentence: which tools, with whose approval, and client material nowhere else. ### What does Qvery build for law firms? An AI agent that drafts from the firm's own files and lays out the claims table with every draft, running inside the systems the lawyers already use, plus training for the associates who check it. We measure it in drafting hours saved and errors caught before a partner signs.