​I've had a few lawyers ask me the same question over the last couple of weeks: what do we think the role of junior lawyers is going to look like in the future now that AI is such a big part of our work?

I was mulling this over when I saw an article on this topic come up in Law News, so clearly this is something that everyone in the industry is thinking about right now. Given the speed that AI can complete tasks that were normally assigned to juniors, it's a very valid and timely question in today's legal market.

"For decades, junior lawyers or law clerks occupied a well-understood place in the legal ecosystem. Fresh from university, they spent their early years doing the work that nobody else had time for – pulling cases, cross-referencing citations, producing the background research that senior lawyers would then shape into arguments. It was unglamorous, often painstaking, and widely considered to be the foundation on which good legal minds were formed." – LawNews, June 2026

And in New Zealand, the pressure on those junior roles is already being felt. Entry-level legal jobs are harder to find, with firms becoming more selective amid economic pressure and AI disruption. Work that once required junior lawyers to spend days, weeks, or even months producing detailed chronologies and evidence analysis can now be completed by AI within the space of 30 minutes to an hour.

Most of what I'm hearing in the market though is less along the lines of "AI will replace junior lawyers" and more "the skills and capabilities that junior lawyers bring to the table will have to evolve."

AI is great, but someone still has to run it and know what prompts to give it to get the best results. And we've all seen the examples of when AI doesn't get it right. A NZ Law Society librarian was recently asked to track down a case cited by an AI tool, and it simply didn't exist. In the legal profession, that kind of error carries enormous risk. The need for verification of AI output is high, and this is an area where juniors would do well to be trained up.

What employers are looking for in their junior hires has shifted and is more focused on someone who has everything that AI doesn’t: instinct, perception and decision-making sensitivity. AI may actually speed up the learning curve, getting juniors in front of clients faster because the grunt work is being handled by technology. But that means communication and interpersonal skills become an even more important trait to develop early.

So what can you do if you're a soon-to-be graduate or a junior lawyer?

The NZ Law Society's AI Research Project 2025, carried out in partnership with LexisNexis, confirmed that AI is already in use across practices but many practitioners remain unsure how to deploy it safely, ethically and effectively. That gap is both a challenge and an opportunity for juniors who are willing to lean in.

The Law News article pointed to something interesting and specific to New Zealand: while universities in the United Kingdom are moving to embed prompt engineering into their law curriculum as a foundational skill alongside legal research and writing, New Zealand hasn't yet made this shift. Which means if you're a junior lawyer, you need to be endeavouring to learn this skill outside of your legal studies.

The broader jobs data tells a similar story. Demand for AI-related skills has surged significantly, and employers in New Zealand are prepared to offer salary premiums averaging 21% above comparable roles for candidates who bring genuine AI capability to the table.

AI won't replace you. But you need to start looking at it as a thinking partner that you work with as you develop in the legal profession. The juniors who thrive in the next five years won't be the ones who know the most case law. They'll be the ones who know how to interrogate AI output, spot what's missing, and bring the human judgement that no model can replicate.