Jeffrey Cobia argues that tools that reproduce drafting patterns speed mimicry but do not automatically teach judgment. Firms control whether those tools accelerate real learning or freeze shallow routines into permanence.
Pattern-generating tools amplify existing training practices: they speed conformity to house style but don’t substitute for explicit reasoning.
Firms can convert tool-driven efficiency into genuine learning by using the tools to explore alternatives and force articulation of drafting strategy.
One holds that junior attorneys should not meaningfully use AI because it will interfere with their development and prevent the formation of sound legal judgment. The other holds that AI will replace junior attorneys by eliminating the tasks they traditionally performed. Both positions rest on the same hidden assumption, which is that AI carries a direction of its own and that the profession's task is to decide whether to accept it or resist it.
Some of those guesses are wrong in ways no one detects, because the work product looks correct. Junior attorneys were never valuable because they performed initial drafting or ran prior art searches. Some are important for a subtle reason that requires an explanation of its own, including the occasional instruction that contradicts an earlier one because the present context demands it.
September 23, 2026, 01:15 PM 1 Share "The professional ladder in patent prosecution is shaped not by the existence of artificial intelligence but by how firms choose to use it." Recent discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practice tend to split into two opposing positions. AI is a multiplier applied to whatever a firm already does. The hands-on component is the first several years of practice.
As AI transforms legal practice, law schools must shift from teaching perfection and certainty to fostering exploration, trial and error, and human-centered skills. The University of Michigan's AI Law and Policy Clinic demonstrates this approach by having students build AI tools for real justice issues, proving that co
A randomized trial gave 133 patent lawyers an AI drafting assistant for 90 days. Drafts improved, but only senior lawyers kept the gain without it. Continue reading this post on Patently-O.
Most corporate AI training teaches tool fluency: how to write a prompt, speed up a workflow. It rarely teaches judgment: knowing when to trust AI output, when to check it, and when not to use it at all. That gap, not tool access, is the skills gap the WEF's 2025 report is actually describing. This post was first publis
From a new NBER working paper: Whether AI assistance builds or erodes professional expertise is unsettled. In a pre-registered three-month randomized controlled trial, we gave 133 practicing patent lawyers at eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms access to a custom AI drafting assistant and measured both their pe
The Federal Circuit's recent decision in Dental Monitoring v. Align highlights the importance of documenting how artificial intelligence-assisted inventions work, and how humans contributed, as such records can support inventorship, written description, eligibility and definiteness requirements, say attorneys at Sterne
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