Every summer associate is now thinking about AI. Almost all of them are thinking about it wrong. They are asking whether it can write their memo. The better question is how to use it without ending your career in week two, and then how to use it to be visibly better than the summer next to you.
Here is what I would tell a summer associate walking in this year.
Read the Firm’s AI Policy Before You Do Anything Else
This is not throat-clearing. This is the whole ballgame. Firms sit all over the map on this. Some have licensed an internal tool and expect you to use it. Some permit approved vendors only. Some prohibit outside AI tools entirely, and a few have not written anything down at all, which is its own kind of hazard.
Find the policy in the first week. If you cannot find it, ask your assigning partner or the professional development team directly. Asking that question makes you look careful. Not asking, and getting it wrong, makes you look like a liability.
Never Put Client Information Into a Tool the Firm Has Not Approved
Pasting a client document, a deal term, a party name, or facts from a matter into a consumer AI tool is a confidentiality problem. You owe a duty of confidentiality to the client under Rule 1.6, and that duty does not have a carve-out for convenience. Consumer tools may retain and train on what you submit.
This is the mistake that does not get forgiven. A missed citation gets corrected. A blown deadline gets absorbed. Putting privileged client information into an unapproved system is a different category of error entirely, and it can end a summer, an offer, and a reputation in a single afternoon.
The rule is simple. If the firm has not approved the tool, no client facts go into it. Not anonymized. Not “just the general question.” Nothing.
Every other mistake on this list is recoverable. This one is not. Learn the policy, then follow it exactly.
Never Submit Work You Cannot Defend Line by Line
Assume you will be asked, in a room, why you drafted something the way you did. If the honest answer is that a tool produced it and you did not check, you have a serious problem.
AI tools generate citations to cases that do not exist. Lawyers have been sanctioned for filing briefs built on invented authority, and courts have not been forgiving about it. Every case must be pulled and read. Every proposition must be verified against the actual source. Every statutory cite must be checked.
The standard is not “did the tool give me this.” The standard is whether you would stake your name on the work, because you are about to.
Where AI Actually Helps a Summer Associate
Within firm policy, and with no client confidential information, the honest use cases are narrower than the hype but real.
Orienting yourself in unfamiliar territory. You are handed a research question in a practice area you have never touched. A general explanation of the doctrinal landscape, drawn from public law, is a reasonable starting point for your own reading. It is a map, not the territory. You still do the research.
Pressure-testing your own reasoning. You have written a memo and you want to know what the strongest counterargument is. Describing your reasoning in the abstract, with no client facts, and asking what you might be missing is a useful exercise. It is a sparring partner, not an oracle.
Improving your writing mechanics. Transitions, structure, cutting a paragraph in half. Your own words, sharpened.
Learning the vocabulary faster. You do not know what a rep and warranty insurance policy does. That is a public question with a public answer, and it saves an associate twenty minutes of explaining.
Where It Does Not Help
It does not know the client. It does not know how this partner likes memos structured, why the deal team has taken a particular position, or what happened on the last call. That knowledge lives with the people around you, which is exactly why the associate who asks a good question is more valuable than the one who quietly prompts their way to a mediocre answer.
It also does not build your judgment. The point of the summer is to develop the ability to look at a messy problem and know what matters. Outsourcing that thinking during the ten weeks you are supposed to be building it is a bad trade, even when nobody catches you.
The Thing Nobody Says Out Loud
Partners can tell. Not always, and not perfectly, but a memo that reads fluent and confident while missing the actual point of the assignment has a particular texture. So does an associate who cannot answer follow-up questions about their own work.
The summer associate who impresses people is not the one who produced the most polished document fastest. It is the one who understood what was being asked, went and did the work, flagged the hard part honestly, and could talk about it. That has not changed and I do not think it is going to.
Use the tools to prepare better and understand faster. Do not use them to avoid the thinking. The thinking is the job you are auditioning for.
Related reading
Summer starting soon? Book a free 15-minute consultation to talk through how to make the most of it.
This is general career advice, not legal or ethics advice, and it is no substitute for your firm’s own policies and your professional responsibility obligations. If you want to talk through your summer strategy one-on-one, the first 15 minutes are free. More here.
Leave a Reply