Your doubts
are reasonable.
Your next move
should be too.

If AI is changing her clients, her opponents, the evidence, and the profession around her, she believes she has to understand it. So begins an unusual experiment in competence. She learns by observing, questioning, testing, challenging experts, and working with people who know things she does not. Can you become genuinely AI-literate without becoming an AI user, and can you prove it when it matters?

The promise is obvious: more people served, faster work, scarce resources extended further. So are the stakes. A careless shortcut can expose a client's secrets, a confident error can cost someone a home, and the people most excited about innovation are not always the ones who will live with its consequences. As she uncovers hidden talent, hidden AI use, eager funders and persuasive vendors, Corinne has to build something harder than a strategy: a vision worthy of the people her organization exists to serve.

Research the issue, make a recommendation, let the partners decide. That has always been the method. But around the firm people are already using AI, avoiding it, selling it, worrying about it, and pretending to understand it, and clients and insurers are starting to ask questions too. Following the problem from practice group to practice group, Glenda discovers that the firm’s real gap is not technology. It is ownership.

A paralegal asks who actually performs the work. A self-represented litigant asks who can afford to verify it. Lawyers, clients, adjudicators and a technologist keep discovering that words like competence, supervision, disclosure and reasonable use are far easier to endorse than to define. Clause by clause, certainty gives way to harder questions and better language.

Seven hundred members, mostly solo, a hundred dollars a year, and a board that cannot agree whether saying something about AI is leadership or exposure. One member came within a click of sending a client's file to a tool nobody had vetted. Another built his own practice on tools he taught himself and needs no saving at all. Six weeks to the annual meeting, a vote he cannot control, and a resolution that has to hold both kinds of member at once.

A research tool returns six cases, ranked, with a green check beside each one. It answers exactly what it was asked, twice, and neither question was what am I missing. By the time anyone reads the actual opinion, the brief has been filed for three weeks and cannot be changed. What can still be changed is the person who has to stand next to it and answer for it.

A supreme court justice, a bar examiner, an accreditor, law professors, judges and disciplinary counsel convene to define professional competence for a new generation. Their first act is to take the same diagnostic they plan to impose on everyone else. The results are uncomfortable. Before they can decide what must be taught, they have to confront what they themselves never learned.