"One of the philosophical positions of our firm is that the best lawyers do the best work … and so we want to have the best lawyers at using AI at our firm," said Adam Unikowsky, co-chair of Jenner & Block's AI task force.
Jenner & Block is among a growing number of law firms expanding AI roles to the associate and partner levels in the hopes of finding future rainmakers. Kirkland & Ellis, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, Greenberg Traurig and Latham & Watkins are also among the firms that recently hired for new AI positions or are on the hunt for such talent.
Unikowsky is spearheading Jenner & Block's push to hire multiple associates for a new AI litigation role. He said he considers artificial intelligence a superpower for lawyers, which is why the firm plans to hire multiple AI-specific associates.
"We've gotten an incredible response and absolutely unbelievable applicants — some jaw-dropping résumés," Unikowsky said. "We're really excited about this position."
He noted that many of the top applicants have coded their own software, or can document being self-starters who have used AI to create work products they wouldn't have been able to create otherwise.
"I've been really amazed by people's willingness to innovate on their own, and I'm really excited about learning from some of these attorneys," Unikowsky said.
The AI litigation associates at Jenner & Block will be allowed to use AI in their practices as extensively as they want. The program involves figuring out ways to reduce the risk of hallucinations and use AI responsibly, and giving the specialized associates access to more powerful tech tools. However, the specifics aren't yet set on what those tools will be, Unikowsky said.
The firm is also going to be measuring their performance to figure out what tasks can and cannot be automated, how long something takes with AI, and what pitfalls they're encountering.
"That's going to be information that we'll be able to incorporate into things like pricing, as well as planning for litigation in general," Unikowsky said.
Matthew Pond, founder and recruiter at the Above the Bar legal recruiting firm in Los Angeles, said AI has surprisingly been a real boon for law firms.
"I think that doom and gloom and the fear that we all had that all of our jobs are going to go — that they're going to be replaced by AI — it's simply not the reality of the market," said Pond, a former Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison attorney.
Pond said the reality is that firms see value in turning over low-level junior associate jobs, like document review, to AI. Instead of an associate doing what would have been billed at 10 hours to do, "firms are implementing AI, cutting it down to say, two hours, and elevating the associate role to something that is more strategic," he said.
Pond added that the chief AI officer roles that firms have added in recent years are generating more hiring across the board.
"AI has become real client-facing work, not just internal efficiency," he said. "Clients want help navigating AI risk directly: contracts, liability, bias audits, IP questions. That's billable work that didn't exist three years ago, underscoring the fallacy of the historical doom and gloom narrative."
Some firms are backing this focus on AI with real capital. Kirkland & Ellis confirmed in May that it has committed $500 million over the next three to four years to build its own proprietary AI platform. It already has more than 180 AI engineers and data scientists on staff, with input from 250 of its own lawyers, including 100 partners, Pond noted.
The firm also recently advertised for an AI adviser role in San Francisco to "champion responsible AI adoption," and design training that "empowers attorneys to use these tools with confidence."
Darin Morgan, a partner at legal recruiting firm Major Lindsey & Africa, said that in the last year, job opportunities focusing on artificial intelligence have more than doubled. There were 655 legal associate job openings in the United States that mentioned AI, up from 255 in the prior 12 months. Most were regular associate roles — with an eventual partner track — but their focus was and is AI-related tasks, he said.
"While I understand people's concern that AI can create an existential problem for associates, the reality is it's also creating an opportunity for a lot of them," Morgan said.
The largest volume of AI openings or AI-adjacent openings that he's been seeing are in D.C., San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Houston.
Pond said he believes that large firms are looking to replace some of the more menial tasks that junior associates do, which he predicts will lead to less hiring of people directly from law school. He suggests law school students try to learn as much as they can about AI to make themselves more attractive to firms, as they are looking for tech-fluent lawyers who treat AI as leverage rather than a threat.
"Associate hiring is where the volume is; firms need people to handle AI vendor contracts, compliance, and a regulatory landscape that is constantly shifting," he said.
Pond added that the new litigation associate roles at Jenner & Block is a good example.
"This lateral practice area is growing fast; we've seen exponential growth in AI-related associate lateral hiring, and the job postings in the last year at the big firms certainly underscore this," he said.
Partner hiring is different. Firms aren't developing AI partners internally as much; they're recruiting laterals who already have a book of business in tech, privacy or regulatory work, he said.
Latham & Watkins is seeking multiple AI services attorneys in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Earlier this month, Pillsbury announced the hiring of the former chief knowledge and innovation officer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP as its chief artificial intelligence officer. Greenberg Traurig is currently seeking an associate to join the data privacy and cybersecurity practice in San Francisco.
"What we're seeing across both associate and partner recruiting in practice is counter to the doom-and-gloom narrative from a couple of years ago that AI was coming for attorney jobs," Pond said.
--Additional reporting by Sarah Martinson. Editing by Robert Rudinger.
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