A few days ago, a junior associate on my legal team walked into my office brimming with excitement. He told me he had used one of the popular AI platforms to generate a perfectly formatted and legally sound draft of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

I took a quick look at the MOU and noted that the AI platform had, for the most part, faithfully replicated our law firm's style, from the letterhead and font to the formatting, alignment, and overall presentation of the document.

As much as I wanted to share his excitement, the millennial lawyer in me, trained by meticulous Baby Boomers and Gen X lawyers, couldn't resist asking two questions.

"Do you think you could have drafted the MOU on your own?"

"If you rely on AI to do the drafting, how will you develop your drafting skills?"

Having successfully plunged my young colleague into an existential crisis (as all supervising lawyers should), I turned to the MOU. It required very few changes. AI had done the heavy lifting, saving us valuable time while leaving the questions I had posed unanswered.

I am old enough to be aware of a time before computers, before online legal databases, when lawyers dictated complex legal documents to stenographers typing away on manual typewriters. Every page had to be meticulously read and re-read, and every mistake corrected by hand before the draft could be sent to the client.

By today's standards, the process sounds painfully slow and undeniably........

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