There Is Only One [Insert Your Name]
Over the past few months, some of the most interesting AI announcements in law have come from firms trying to build something more than faster drafting tools. Vorys has developed AI personas modeled on nineteen of its partners. And Kirkland has committed five hundred million dollars to a proprietary platform shaped by its own lawyers, technologists, data, and way of working.
It is tempting to read all of this as another chapter in the profession’s race for efficiency. Faster drafting, better research, smarter review, more consistency, and more scale are all part of the story. But a drafting tool performs a task. A persona built from one partner’s judgment, or a platform built from the collective knowledge of a firm, is a different kind of thing because it does not just produce the work. It tries to reflect something about the people behind the work.
In one sense there is nothing strange about that, because lawyers have always learned by studying other lawyers. Lawyers have always gone to the courthouse to watch the good lawyers and study why their arguments worked. They also watched the bad lawyers who were unprepared and learned just as much, because the bad examples taught things the good ones could not. They read the brief from the partner everyone respected and took it apart to see what made it work. Then they read the brief that missed the point and took that one apart too. They sat in meetings, listened to calls, marked up drafts, and got their own work back covered in red ink. Slowly, if they were paying attention, they began to see what they did not know how to see before.
That is the apprenticeship model. It is not clean, formal, or efficient, but at its best it is how judgment passes from one generation to the next. Nobody hands you a formula and says here is how to be a good lawyer. You watch, listen, try, fail, and get corrected. I had mentors who taught me exactly that way. Take the good habits, leave the bad ones, and go be yourself.
That is the thought I keep coming back to when I read about partner personas and firm-owned platforms. Can a persona, or a tool built on a firm’s collective way of thinking, become another way for a young lawyer to study experience?
There is real value in this exercise, and the upside should not be understated. No profession should be careless with countless years of judgment. A lawyer who has lived through cases that went sideways, deals that nearly collapsed, witnesses who surprised everyone, and arguments that sounded airtight until they met a real opponent has learned things that will never fit neatly in a manual. If these tools are built and used thoughtfully, they could preserve some of those lessons, sharpen early drafts, surface better questions, and give lawyers a stronger foundation before they bring their own judgment to the work. There is real promise in making good judgment easier to study. But studying a good lawyer was never the same thing as becoming one.
The apprenticeship model also includes bad examples, and those examples matter. You learn something important by watching a lawyer overstate the record, bury the weakness, or mistake volume for persuasion. You learn what not to become. A purpose built persona, presumably, will only model someone worth modeling, but excellence was never the whole curriculum. A young lawyer also needs poor examples to recognize the habits that make work weak, inflated, or unpersuasive.
The apprenticeship model also includes struggle, and not just the struggle of getting a draft back covered in red ink. The best mentors do not always hand you the answer at once. At least the good ones I had seemed to slow drip it. They ask a question, point to a weakness, let you try again, push you a little further, and only then save you from drowning. That back and forth matters. You do not develop judgment simply by receiving the polished answer, even if the answer comes with helpful edits. You develop it by wrestling with the problem long enough to see why your first answer was not good enough. A persona may be able to give partner-style feedback, and that may be very useful, but the profession still has to pay attention to whether the tool helps the lawyer stay in the struggle long enough to think harder or resolves the struggle too quickly.
So use the tools, because they will only get better and may already be designed with exactly these concerns in mind. There is undoubtedly a real advantage in using them. But the thing to protect is not the workflow. It is the lawyer. A persona can be a great foundation, but it cannot be the destination. A platform can preserve institutional knowledge, but it cannot relieve the lawyer of the duty to think.
The goal was never imitation. The goal is formation. Watch the good lawyers and the bad ones. Read the briefs that work and the briefs that fail. Learn everything both of them have to teach, and then do the harder work no model can do for you. The beauty of the practice of law has always been its individual lawyers and their unique styles. Frankly, that is the beauty of life.
Remember, there is only one you.
