Kennedys has agreed a strategic partnership with Spellbook, a generative AI platform for lawyers, to deliver a legal training programme for junior lawyers.
The initiative is designed to provide junior lawyers with the necessary skills in the face of the changes that AI and automation are bringing to entry-level legal work.
It is believed to be one of the first large-scale projects to address AI’s impact on early career training.
It is feared that the growing influence of AI and automation is eroding junior-level legal work, for example, the traditional training stages of first-draft contract preparation and document review.
Spellbook’s platform uses advanced legal AI to rapidly streamline the reviewing, redlining and drafting of legal contracts, and is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 and other large language models.
Currently, it is operating in 80 countries where more than 10 million contracts are being reviewed by 4,000 legal teams.
The training programme created by the two parties will utilise simulated frameworks and AI-assisted drafting exercises to replicate the learning opportunities that may eventually fade away from the office.
It is set to be launched later this year, where initially the programme will be piloted across Kennedys’ US and UK offices. There are plans to share what has been digested from the programme across the profession.
Catherine Goodman, Kennedys’ chief knowledge officer, said: “Having undertaken many AI and tech projects where we are improving workflows, it seemed natural to also leverage AI to support learning and development for our lawyers.
“With Spellbook, we are creating simulated legal work scenarios where the junior attorneys can practice the work they will do in real life and gain deeper understanding of the work they are doing, making them more effective when it comes to actually doing client-facing work.”
The programme will differ in length depending on the legal teams the junior lawyers are collaborating with, and there are different elements to it with some short assignments alongside longer and more progressive tasks.
Goodman added that there is a possibility that this type of legal AI training will become more commonplace.
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