For decades, the legal industry adhered to a straightforward division of labor: law schools taught doctrine and law firms taught newly minted lawyers how to actually do their jobs. It wasn’t necessarily the most efficient approach. Law schools struggled to find much useful to impart in the third year and law firms had to convince clients to foot the bill for young lawyers spinning their wheels, but the structure more or less worked.
Now law firms are hiring new attorneys before they’ve taken their first exams, associate classes are getting smaller, and some firms are leaning on AI instead of backfilling. Add in that the real (or imagined) benefits of AI has clients balking at covering the cost for young lawyers, and the tried and true training model starts to creak under the weight. When firms don’t have the money or patience to handle practical training at scale, and want to law schools producing candidates worthy of hiring before 1L winter break, that shifts the practical training burden back onto the academy.
Transitioning to the new model will require some creative rethinking from the schools.
Vanderbilt Law School is the first law school putting AltaClaro’s AI deposition simulator DepoSim in front of students, in a rollout announced this morning through the school’s AI Law Lab.
We covered DepoSim back in February when AltaClaro and Verbit launched the product with six elite firms in the beta cohort. At the time, the simulator had one hypothetical case — Rowan v. Harpy — and a witness that could be toggled from cooperative to hostile. The AI hears the questions and formulates an answer. The user gets evaluated along multiple metrics. I tested it, and despite my best efforts found myself unable to replicate the greatest deposition of all time and entice the digital witness to try to fight me.
Clearly a feature planned for a future release:
And there are a lot of features in line ahead of my Texas style brawl. The offering now includes cases ranging from employment, IP, complex commercial, and a real estate investment partnership dispute. Antitrust, securities, and mass torts are queued up for imminent release and expert witnesses and 30(b)(6) designees are rolling out down the road too. With the success of this technology, AltaClaro isn’t going to stop at depositions either. In the fourth quarter, the company plans to move into simulators for oral argument, meet-and-confers, and cross-examination — running on that same Rowan v. Harpy fact pattern, to give users the opportunity to work through the lifecycle of single matter. Real litigators carry the facts with them throughout the process, litigators-in-training should too.
Which brings us back to the law school partnership. Emily Pavuluri of Vanderbilt’s AI Law Lab, said the students who showed up to the first AltaClaro workshop arrived more dialed in than even her already high expectations expected. They’d done the prep work and came in with pointed questions about the process. AltaClaro CEO Abdi Shayesteh said that the level of the questions matched what he gets from partners onboarding the technology at firms.
The “tech-forward lawyer” has lived in conference floor hypotheticals for a while now, but it seems to be very real for law students. Pavuluri reported that students are asking what the tech stack looks like at firms, eager to get experience with any tools firms might expect them to know. DepoSim may be first-and-foremost about coaching offline skills, but it’s part of a broader landscape where students fear smaller hiring classes and tech savvy as a differentiator.
And maybe moving training to a setting that actually, you know, teaches people carries extra advantages. Pavuluri said the students enthusiastically took negative feedback from the simulator, which makes sense because it’s a lot easier to hear bad news when your paycheck isn’t directly implicated. Firm culture encourages lawyers to never be visibly bad at anything, it’s a nerd swagger that doesn’t lend itself to learning new skills.
That said, the Vanderbilt students working with the tool were also excited to receive a healthy share of positive feedback. One student reacted to the benchmarking report with, “I would’ve thought I did worse.“
For decades, the answer to “where do junior lawyers get their reps” has been pro bono. Not exclusively, of course, but substantially. The stakes in a lot of these proceedings have always been high, but they’ve been ratcheted up by the administration. Supervising attorneys have good reason to worry about turning a junior loose on a matter with such dire downside risks. That fear leads to more micromanagement, and that micromanagement wipes away a lot of the learning opportunities. Gaining simulated experience — both in school and at the firm — should go a long way to assuaging those senior fears. DepoSim is not a replacement for pro bono work, but a tool that ensures a lawyer with 20 reps against a hostile witness under their belt will be ready to effectively protect a pro bono client.
Vanderbilt is opening access beyond the classroom next week, with clinical deployment the obvious next step. The next several years will involve a lot of rethinking about how we approach professional training. Vandy and AltaClaro have started charting out a new path.
Earlier: Deposition Simulator Uses AI To Bring Training Opportunities To Young Lawyers
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.