Steelman · slot A
The vanishing apprenticeship
A law school dean watching the entry-level market would argue —Junior associate work was never just billable hours — it was the apprenticeship through which lawyers built judgment. Reviewing thousands of documents, drafting routine memos, redlining boilerplate: that's how you learn to spot the anomaly that breaks a case, the clause that creates exposure, the argument a court won't buy. If AI eats that tier of work — and Clifford Chance cutting London jobs and shrinking summer programs suggests it already is — we're not just losing jobs, we're losing the training ground itself. A decade from now, who supervises the AI? Partners retire. If we don't deliberately rebuild apprenticeship outside the billable pyramid, we will produce a generation of lawyers who can prompt a model but can't tell when it's wrong.