The shrinking junior-lawyer pipeline

“The pattern is showing the majority of large firms will have smaller first- and second-year associate populations. … The further out I look, the greater the level of uncertainty about what their needs are going to be.”

-Gretta Rusanow, head of advisory services at Citi’s law firm group.^[1]

Fewer first-years

Firms with more than 500 lawyers hired 7.5% fewer graduates from the Class of 2025 than from the year before, about 540 fewer, the first fall since 2014.^[2],[3] Across the Am Law 200, entry-level hiring has sat at about 7,400 a year for four years, while lateral hiring rose 12% in 2025 and laterals made up 51% of associate hires.^[4] In a separate sample of 141 firms, lateral hires outnumbered entry-level hires for the first time.^[5] Supply moved the other way: law school applicants rose 27% in two years.^[6]

What firms plan

Two-thirds of 57 large firms surveyed by Citi expect fewer first-years in 2028 than in 2025, nearly 60% expect fewer second-years, and 19% do not know.^[1] In an earlier Citi and Hildebrandt survey, 86% of large firms planned to grow their associate ranks through 2027, but only 35% planned bigger first-year classes, a shift “to a more senior demographic … likely driven by the adoption of generative AI”.^[8]

Few firms are firing juniors. As one lawyer put it, “Firms are hoping that increased productivity will mean more workload at the same staff level. It’s already happening - most people with experience are reviewing increased output of lower number AI-powered juniors in many practices.”

Laterals arrive with their “training expenses borne by another firm”, in SurePoint’s words, and demand for laterals with AI expertise rose 106% in a year.^[4] One recruiting founder expects “a resurgence of 3L hiring, clerk hiring, and lawyers with one to two years of experience because that person has way more experience than a second-semester law student.”^[4] The trained juniors do not all stay, either: 83% of associates who left their firms in 2025 did so within five years of being hired, a record.^[5]

What firms are doing

First-pass review, research, diligence and first drafts are where juniors learned, and they are the first work AI does. Harvard’s Center on the Legal Profession calls the result a coordination failure: each firm automating is rational, but together they erode the pipeline every firm relies on.^[9] One lawyer: “For juniors, drafting itself is a learning exercise that’s better than reviewing something that’s 80% right. The reality is most of the learning is done on the job, and for a long time, the process of learning has been billed to clients.”

Seniors report juniors who send AI output unread, and one firm fired such a junior after about six months: “Not only were they creating more work for everyone else but they weren’t learning how to do their job.”

Ropes & Gray lets first-years put about 400 billable hours a year towards learning AI.^[10] 96% of summer associates used AI in 2026, up from 80% a year earlier, and fewer than one in five worried about their jobs.^[11] 76% of practising lawyers expect new graduates to be able to cite-check AI output, but only 20% of third-year law students say they are proficient with it.^[12] 71% of law firm leaders expect junior roles to change, and 74% say partners are the least prepared to use AI.^[13] At one firm, “Our juniors spent more time this year in AI trainings than practice area specific ones.”

Courts face the same question: in Los Angeles, six judges and their research attorneys are piloting an “AI law clerk”.^[14] Chief Justice Roberts’ view: “it’s going to be really tough for young lawyers”.^[15]

What lawyers say

Some anonymous quotes:

• “We use ai a lot in our M&A work, but it needs human review and isn’t close to entirely getting rid of juniors by any means. It does mean that things like diligence are done with fewer people than 5-10 years ago, but definitely not no people.”
• “I watched two associates redline each other and the author was Claude. They didn't even bother to edit the name of the author.”
• “Honestly, using Harvey for "thanks" and "will do" emails would raise an eyebrow. A summer letting AI write every email makes it hard to tell who they are and how they actually communicate.”
• “I feel like I’m caught between mopping up a junior’s AI slop and a partner who thinks AI is a legal magician that allows me to do 20 complex tasks in half the time.” (a Big Law mid-level)
• “Wanted to be a lawyer. Now, less than 3 years into it, lawyering … is pretty quickly evolving into a job where I’m expected to spend a material amount of time engineering AI prompts and cleaning up AI output.”
• “Junior lawyers have been the worst in living memory every year since I started practicing. Im sure this reflects objective reality and not some foible of human judgment.”
• “FWIW, my sense as an appellate practitioner (by definition, in the role of viewing and critiquing not only the strategies and actions of clients but more importantly the work of other attorneys, trial judges, and appellate judges) is that, over the past 3–5 years, clients, trial counsel, trial judging, and appellate opinions have all gotten far worse. Every day I see mistakes in the fundamentals of practice — logic and what used to be taken for common sense are out the window, and it’s as if people aren’t bothering to take 30 quiet minutes to sit back and ponder the matters at hand. Gut feelings and “pantsing” hold sway.”
• “Senior attorneys are too busy trying to bill and hit hours and there’s not really any immediate incentive to taking time out of your day to sit down and explain things to your juniors.”
• “Okay except when junior lawyers ask questions because they don’t know, they also get castigated. It’s a lose lose.”
• “Be blunt. Tell me I’m being terrible in these areas and give examples. Then ask me why and use that a transition piece into what additional support I need from you.” (a young associate)
• “My basic advice to them was that Harvey was the start of their research, not the end. Start there, understand the topic, synthesize it for me, use Harvey as a tool, but you have to do the other steps. They got it.”
• “Yes this is what being a senior lawyer is. If you can only do what you as a single person can, you are limited in what you can get done. Your value as an attorney will flatline. Only by teaching and managing others can you do more than what a single person can fit into a day. Im also in this phase as a newer manager and its definitely hard. I also basically never got the kind of training that I give now. I wish I could just tell people, I figured it out on my own so you should too. But I also remember having bosses who were terrible managers and would rather not be that way.”
• “I think the only answer is to force juniors to do the work anyways, even if the work is done. They turn into apprentices, essentially.”

Conclusions

• The work that trained juniors is the work AI does first, so training now has to be deliberate, and someone has to pay for it.
• Tech law firms (made up of partner-level lawyers) and more solo practitioners have emerged. Whether these businesses will be able to successfully expand and scale given their tech dependency is still in question.
• Practitioners will have more or less competition with technology based on their practice area, so we may see a redistribution of which kind of law practitioners focus on.
• Equally, more work may move in-house, with lawyers being stretched over a greater breadth of practice areas.

References

1. Roy Strom, ‘Big Law First-Year Hiring Set to Plunge as History, AI Collide’ (Bloomberg Law, 10 September 2026) <news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/big-law-first-year-hiring-set-to-plunge-as-history-ai-collide>
2. NALP, ‘Strong Entry-Level Legal Employment Persists Despite Sharp Drop in Federal Government and Public Interest Hiring’ (press release, 5 August 2026) <www.nalp.org/uploads/PressReleases/Classof2025SelectedFindings_PressRelease.pdf>
3. Staci Zaretsky, ‘Biglaw Is Bigger Than Ever, But Its Associate Classes Are Getting Smaller’ (Above the Law, 6 August 2026) <abovethelaw.com/2026/08/biglaw-is-bigger-than-ever-but-its-associate-classes-are-getting-smaller/>
4. SurePoint, 2026 Law School Hiring Report (July 2026) <surepoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/SurePoints-2026-Law-School-Hiring-Report.pdf>
5. Amanda Robert, ‘Associates continue to leave firms within 5 years of hire, new report says’ (ABA Journal, 22 April 2026) <www.abajournal.com/news/article/associates-continue-to-leave-firms-within-five-years-of-hire-report-says>
6. Julianne Hill, ‘Law school applications reach record high—again’ (ABA Journal, 24 August 2026) <www.abajournal.com/news/article/law-school-applications-reach-record-high-again>
7. American Bar Association, ‘Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar releases annual law school data’ (ABA News, 15 December 2025) <www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2025/12/council-of-legal-ed-law-school-data/>
8. ‘Law Firms’ Junior Roles At Risk From AI, Report Says’ (Law360, 15 December 2025) <www.law360.com/pulse/articles/2422148>
9. Anthea Roberts and David B Wilkins, ‘AI and the Legal Profession’ (Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, 2026) <clp.law.harvard.edu/ai-and-the-legal-profession/deck/series-deck.html>
10. ‘Ropes & Gray encourages junior lawyers to spend 20% of billable time on AI’ (Legal Cheek, November 2025) <www.legalcheek.com/2025/11/ropes-gray-encourages-juniors-to-spend-20-of-billable-hours-on-ai/>
11. Alison Knezevich, ‘The 2026 Summer Associate Experience: AI Led The Way’ (Law360 Pulse, 15 September 2026) <www.mlex.com/pulse/mid-law/articles/2523789/the-2026-summer-associate-experience-ai-led-the-way>
12. Julianne Hill, ‘New lawyers are expected to be AI savvy, new study shows’ (ABA Journal, 10 February 2026) <www.abajournal.com/news/article/new-lawyers-expected-to-be-ai-savvy-bloomberg-law-study-shows>
13. ‘AI Set To Transform Junior Lawyer Roles, Survey Finds’ (Law360, 24 March 2026) <www.law360.com/articles/2456965>
14. ‘California Judges Are Testing a New AI Clerk. You Won’t Know if It’s Looking at Your Case’ (KQED, 26 May 2026), reporting CalMatters <www.kqed.org/news/12085144/california-judges-are-testing-a-new-ai-clerk-you-wont-know-if-its-looking-at-your-case>
15. Tara Suter, ‘Chief Justice John Roberts says in the age of AI “it’s going to be really tough for young lawyers”’ (The Hill, 7 May 2026) <www.aol.com/articles/chief-justice-john-roberts-says-090901441.html>