But I Knew PowerPoint: A Lesson for the LLM Era

Technology has always complicated the relationship between younger lawyers and more experienced ones. Long before anyone was debating large language models, legal institutions were already dealing with a familiar problem. The younger lawyer often understood the tool first. The senior lawyer often understood the law, the strategy, and the stakes.

That tension is not new.

What is new is the power of the tool.

Large language models are not just a better PowerPoint. They can draft, summarize, organize, and generate work product at a speed that changes the rhythm of legal practice. But the profession is still making a very old mistake. It assumes that technical fluency and legal judgment will somehow work themselves out on their own.

That is not what is happening.

What is actually happening is much messier. Younger lawyers are using these tools quietly, sometimes without the knowledge of the senior lawyers supervising them. Some of that use is thoughtful. Some of it is careless. But technical comfort is not the same thing as legal judgment. A young lawyer may know how to get an answer from the system without yet knowing whether it can be trusted, what must be verified, or what should never be delegated.

At the same time, senior lawyers and judges are experimenting with these tools on their own, often without enough technical fluency to understand the dangers or their full potential and where they may be most useful.

One side risks over trusting the technology because it lacks experience. The other risks underestimating it because it lacks technical depth. Both are operating from incomplete competence.

I have seen versions of this problem before.

Years ago, when I was a young prosecutor, I was asked to help try a homicide case that was far more complex than anything I had handled before. There were multiple victims, a fire scene, and mixed DNA all over the place. I did not really know how to try that case.

But I knew PowerPoint.

At the time, that mattered. Before PowerPoint, lawyers often used foam boards, put them on easels, and hoped you had anticipated what you would need before trial started. PowerPoint gave you flexibility and arguably, a better way to try your case.

So I built a presentation showing which pieces of evidence contained whose DNA and where the mixtures appeared. The senior prosecutor I was working with had what I did not have, which was courtroom experience and legal judgment. He knew how to try serious cases. He understood what mattered. What he did not know was the technology.

On paper, it sounded like a perfect pairing. But it was horrible.

I had built the slides around the DNA evidence, but I had clearly gotten the order wrong. The sequence did not match how the senior prosecutor wanted the evidence to land. He needed to control the timing and the impact. Instead, the next sample appeared on the screen before he was ready for it, and he did not know the technology well enough to adapt on the fly. He was trying to read slides he had not built, interpret visuals that were not in his language, and present science he wanted to simplify but could not because the tool was driving the pace. The presentation was running him instead of the other way around.

That experience stayed with me because it taught me something important. A younger lawyer's technical fluency and an older lawyer's legal judgment do not automatically blend just because both are present. Without coordination, structure, and a shared method, each strength can remain isolated from the other.

But that was only half the lesson.

In another murder case, I was asked to decipher cell tower records at a time when almost no one knew how to read them. The issue landed on my desk because I was the younger prosecutor and more comfortable with something new and technical. I still remember the day I figured them out and realized they could trace the defendant's location at the time of the murder and his flight afterwards. Those records became critical to the prosecution.

That experience taught the other side of the coin. Sometimes the younger lawyer should take the lead on the new technology. Sometimes that is exactly the right call. But even then, the value does not come from technical fluency standing alone. It comes from connecting that fluency to legal theory, proof, and strategy.

That is why the profession's current AI moment feels so familiar.

The problem is not simply that younger lawyers know the tools and senior lawyers know the law. The problem is that both sides are often engaging the tools from positions of partial knowledge. The younger lawyer may know how to use the system without fully understanding the legal risk. The senior lawyer may understand the legal risk without fully understanding what the system can do, where it fails, and how it should be supervised.

When a PowerPoint presentation falls apart in a murder trial, it is not just embarrassing. It can interfere with the presentation of critical evidence and jeopardize the case itself. When a young associate relies on an LLM to draft research or prepare a filing without enough experience to catch what is wrong, the danger is similar. In both situations, the tool is shaping the work before the experienced lawyer has fully controlled it.

The reverse problem matters too. When a senior partner dismisses the tool because a few casual prompts produced mediocre answers, or a judge experiments in isolation and forms a quick view of what the tool can or cannot do, the institution may miss genuine opportunities to improve workflow and reserve human time for human judgment.

That is how you end up with the same unhealthy split.

The younger lawyer becomes the hidden user. The senior lawyer becomes the occasional dabbler.

That is not a modernization strategy designed for success.

Legal institutions need more than informal pairing. Younger lawyers need supervision, transparency, and judgment. Senior lawyers need enough technological literacy to guide use intelligently. Otherwise both sides keep experimenting in parallel, and the institution mistakes unmanaged adaptation for progress.

That was true in the transition from foam boards to PowerPoint.

It is even more true in the transition from traditional legal work to LLMs.

Technical fluency without legal judgment is dangerous. Legal judgment without technological literacy is increasingly incomplete. The institutions that get this right will be the ones that build a real bridge between the two before the gap becomes a liability.