A 2025 In-House Legal Career Roadmap for the Age of AI
Continuous learning has never been more important in the legal profession. As artificial intelligence reshapes knowledge work, lawyers must develop new competencies to stay relevant.
While a majority of in-house legal professionals report that they’re optimistic about generative AI’s impact on their careers, the enthusiasm is mixed with concerns about potential job displacement, skill obsolescence, and loss of control over work.
Fear is a natural response in times of change. But as with any new technology, the road to GenAI mastery begins with small steps. The GenAI and Future Corporate Legal Work: How Ready Are In-House Teams? report not only assesses the attitudes of in-house legal professionals toward GenAI, it lists the key skills lawyers will need to hone to evolve their careers.
Not surprisingly, AI literacy and AI tool proficiency feature highly. But standard soft skills such as ethical decision-making and adaptability are also crucial. A detailed career roadmap weaves the competencies into a nine-month action plan that takes readers from AI experimentation and evalutation to workflow integration, and through building a culture of continuous learning and investment.
Build a Strong Foundation With AI Literacy
AI literacy involves understanding the concepts and processes behind GenAI such as machine learning, natural language processing, and neural networks.
Despite the breathless hype of the last year, GenAI currently operates on probability and statistics – also known as guesswork. The technology makes errors and can exhibit bias. Lawyers need to understand the technology as a helpful tool, but not one that can be relied upon uncritically.
Everlaw CEO AJ Shankar helps to demystify GenAI by encouraging users to think GenAI as a smart intern – it can make the job easier, but can also make mistakes and shouldn’t be allowed to work unsupervised. Like an intern or a first-year associate, the tool’s output must be evaluated. This approach will help lawyers use GenAI more effectively within their organizations.
The ACC/Everlaw report suggests workshops and industry resources to get you started.
Develop Practical Experience With AI Tools
It’s not enough to read about GenAI to gain an abstract understanding. Lawyers need hands-on experience with a variety of AI tools to know which ones to use – and when not to use them.
Many are already using GenAI on the job. The ACC/Everlaw report shows that chief legal officers are leading the charge. They’re more likely to use GenAI for legal work: 79 percent said they use GenAI at least weekly, compared to 56 percent of mid-level attorneys and just 61 percent of junior attorneys. They also report a stronger understanding of how to use the tools for their work.
The list of use cases is still evolving. Some of the most commonly mentioned include legal research for tasks such as case law analysis, contract review, and document summarization. In-house teams looking to handle litigation and subpoena requests more efficiently are testing LLM-powered review and drafting tools that are built directly into ediscovery platforms. Because GenAI is a rapidly evolving technology, lawyers will need to continue to be flexible and curious about new developments.
Download the report for tips on researching and evaluating AI tools.
Assess the Risks and Ethical Implications of GenAI
As with any new technology, lawyers need to make sure they and their companies are using GenAI responsibly. While attorneys receive training in managing ethical issues in law school, advanced AI tools raise new concerns that legal teams must consider.
Some of the questions legal professionals should be asking:
Is the tool being used secure? Is private data being disclosed to a third party vendor, or being made public if GenAI outputs are published?
If errors are used for decision making or incorporated into public-facing documents, what are the liabilities? What assurances are in place to prevent such occurrences?
Do the large language models that underlie generative AI tools incorporate protected intellectual property? What steps should be taken and does the AI vendor or the end user assume the risk?
In-house attorneys need to be involved in the selection and rollout of GenAI tools to ensure that risks are mitigated and use cases are appropriate. Thus the importance of staying up to date with evolving ethical standards around these new technologies.
Your Career Path to AI Competency
The full ACC/Everlaw report covers eight core skills for attorneys to hone in the AI age. It also provides a nine-month career roadmap for reaching that competency. It outlines a plan to first develop an AI foundation through AI literacy and identification of tasks suited to AI automation, then describes best practices for experimentation with tools and integrating them through trials and demos with select vendors. Finally, the roadmap guides readers through strategic thinking that leverages a deeper understanding of AI for better business value.
