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When Kiara Morris, an early in career lawyer at MinterEllison, opens a draft of legal advice, she launches Microsoft Copilot alongside. With court dates approaching, she turns to the AI tool to anticipate potential questions from opposing counsel and uncover case examples relevant to her jurisdiction in Western Australia.

“As a junior lawyer, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to get courtroom experience early on,” Morris explains. “With my first appearance coming up, Copilot has helped me think through the kinds of questions I might face. It’s been a huge boost to my confidence and how prepared I feel.”

By mid-morning in MinterEllison’s Sydney office, Jett Potter is usually also working in Copilot, using agents he’s built to help shape briefing decks or review his work. The Lawyer, who is part of the firm’s AI advisory team, will drop an outline into his critique agent and ask it to improve the structure and tone, and pull any relevant research in so he can focus on the argument rather than formatting.

“I rely on it for the majority of my day – more than I use Teams,” he explains. “I’ve created an agent that is designed to think like a top-tier consulting partner, pointing it to content that has been reviewed by Partners and has received positive feedback.

“I can get to the final output faster because I’ve already incorporated multiple rounds of feedback using the agent before sharing it for review,” he said.

Kiara and Jett are among the many young professionals who are using AI as a ‘rehearsal room’, a reviewer and more to accelerate their learning curves.

Embracing high-value work with AI assistance

Morris is using Microsoft Copilot’s Researcher Agent extensively in her role to speed up and deepen the research that she does as a junior lawyer.  

“I work in the Infrastructure and Construction team, where I’m often getting my head around complex engineering terminology,” said Morris. “Researcher helps me quickly surface and contextualise technical concepts that aren’t necessarily legal but are important to understanding the client’s requirements.

“It can be targeted at Western Australia specifically, ensuring I can deliver precise, context-appropriate information, making my research process much more thorough and efficient.”

From there, she asks Copilot to probe her drafts from the client’s perspective to identify what’s missing, what questions could be asked and what she’ll need to defend. That way, she can pre-answer those questions before sending the draft up the chain.

“When seniors ask, ‘Have you considered this approach?’, I can say yes, and justify why this is the best path forward. That builds their trust in me,” she says.  

Potter, too, is using AI to accelerate his progression towards higher-value work. As part of the AI Advisory team, he uses his skills to build custom agents and design courses the firm can present to clients. He recently scoped a short AI training program with practice leads, grouping common questions into modules and pairing real scenarios with step-by-step prompts.

That work brings him into partner and director discussions earlier, where he is invited to provide perspective on new initiatives and ideas for AI, as well as run demos.

“There’s often a big shift from being a junior doing the administrative work to joining senior employees in thinking strategically about how we work with and what we offer clients. I feel like my early in career peers and I get to do more of that now because leaders are engaging with us for our AI skills.

“We’ve just successfully sold our first AI training program to a client. It’s an idea that I originally proposed to our leadership and took the lead on drafting the supporting documents and prompt guide,” he says. “Using AI made the turnaround fast and didn’t impact my other priorities, while also giving me greater visibility with Partners.”

What’s happening at MinterEllison mirrors a broader trend. In a recent data drop from  Microsoft, CTRL+Career, a survey of 500 early-career professionals across Australia and New Zealand found that 80 percent those surveyed feel their AI skills have given them more visibility at work compared to before they started using AI. Meanwhile, 83 percent also say their senior leaders actively seek input or ideas from them on how AI can be used at work.

Improving career prospects by joining senior conversations

Morris, Potter and other younger staff members are now being asked to contribute across the firm as its leaders seek to harness their practical understanding of AI.

“I get opportunities to sit in high-level executive meetings where I’m two or three levels below the next person because they want our perspective on whether a process could be improved using AI,” says Potter.

Morris says MinterEllison offices in Perth and across Australia have been sharing ways of developing day-to-day AI use, with her input. “I’ve had opportunities to share ideas and best practice for rolling out tools and client solutions with senior leadership, in a forum that wasn’t really possible before AI,” she says.

However, despite the broad applications for this developing technology within their sector, both employees are conscious that human input will still be required to ensure all AI output meets the bar. Legal work, in particular, still demands a human at the centre of all client work.

“We have professional obligations not to take information at face value,” says Morris. “Even if AI gives you a small extract from a case, you need to ensure the case as a whole is relevant – and this is the critical step to ensuring you actually learn the content that AI produces. If you’re just copying and pasting, it will get exposed later when seniors test your understanding.”

Learning the content and not just using AI as information retrieval or shortcut remains top of mind for early in career professionals, with the CTRL+Career survey revealing that nearly half feel they don’t learn the content as well as they did before they started using AI. However, the majority (92 percent) feel confident in their ability to critically assess and challenge the AI-generated outputs – Signalling a need to ensure they are taught to use it to enhance critical thinking, not take away from it.

While Potter also acknowledges the need for human checks and balances, he is ultimately convinced that AI literacy has become a non-negotiable for any aspiring employee, whether they are pursuing a career in law or another industry.

“It’s a must. There’s this rumbling in our entire industry, with people asking, ‘Can AI replace my job?’ The way I think about it is that the person using AI will get your job,” he says. “So, you need to jump on the bandwagon. If nothing else, you need to understand how the technology works and how to get the most out of it. It’s not perfect; there are limitations, but you only know that by using it.”