Most AI training teaches people what the tool can do. The useful version teaches them what it gets wrong, because that is what they will have to catch.
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Competence is among the duties ABA Formal Opinion 512 identifies as engaged by generative AI, and in practice it resolves to something quite specific: can this person recognise when the output is wrong. That is a different skill from using the product, and it is not taught by vendor onboarding, which is designed to build confidence rather than calibrate it. A lawyer who has been shown what the tool can do and not what it fabricates will trust it precisely in the situations where trust is least warranted — and will do so with the same confidence the output itself projects. Training that starts with failure modes produces people who can supervise; training that starts with features produces people who cannot.
In this order. Reversing it is the most common design error, and it is why so much training does not change behaviour.
Invented authority, real cases with invented holdings, fabricated quotations — shown, not described.
The output reads identically whether right or wrong. The hesitancy reviewers rely on is simply absent.
What must be checked, by whom, before work leaves — the operational obligation, taught as such.
The confidentiality rules, concretely, with the reasoning so people can apply them to new cases.
The escalation route, taught as normal practice rather than as a disciplinary process.
Last, and it lands better here — people trust the capability claims more once the limits were honest.
How firms run it.
It is the difference between a firm that catches its errors and one that files them.
Ask the tool for authority on a proposition with none, in front of the group, and let them watch a perfectly formatted citation to a case that does not exist appear. Nothing else in the session will be remembered as clearly.
Less than firms fear for the core, more than they plan for the refresh. An hour covering failure modes, the firm's verification requirement and the confidentiality rules changes behaviour more than a day of prompting workshops. What is consistently underestimated is that the tools change — behaviour differs between model versions and product releases — so a single onboarding session decays. Short, periodic updates when something material changes work better than an annual course that is out of date by the time it runs.
Generally yes, because their obligation is different. Associates are largely producing output; partners are largely reviewing work they did not produce and signing it. A supervisor needs to know what to look for and what the firm's process requires of them, not how to write a better prompt. Mixed sessions tend to default to the producer's perspective, and partners disengage — which is the worst outcome, since they carry the supervisory duty and the signature.
Distinguish between refusal and unaddressed objection, because they look identical and are not. Many sceptics have specific, well-founded concerns — about confidentiality, about verification burden, about output quality in their practice area — and those are design input rather than resistance. Some genuinely do not want to change, which is a management conversation rather than a training one. Firms that treat every objection as the second kind lose the information contained in the first, which is usually the more valuable of the two.
Yes, and increasingly they arrive having used these tools extensively without any of the professional framing. Law students and junior lawyers may be more fluent operators than the partners supervising them and considerably less aware of the confidentiality rules, the verification obligation and the sanctions record. Induction is also the cheapest moment to set the expectation, before habits form around whatever they used at their last firm or at law school.
Describe who needs training and what they do. The Institute will help you design it.