The best practitioners in any firm carry a body of judgment that was never written down, systematized, or made fully accessible to the people working alongside them. Learning it has always required proximity, time, and a degree of luck about which matters you happened to work on and which partners had the bandwidth to invest in your development.

Writing for Daily Business Review, Jeff Cox, Steno's Director of Brand and a Florida attorney, suggests that generative AI changes that equation and that the attorney digital twin is the most practical expression of that change available right now.

The piece points out that the biggest barrier to associate development has been access to the tacit reasoning patterns of excellent lawyers, not effort or intelligence. Here's how Jeff frames it:

Mentorship is the traditional mechanism, and it is genuinely valuable when the conditions for it exist: the right partner, the right matter, and the right bandwidth. In practice, those conditions align less reliably than a busy practice often allows. Associates who happen into the right assignments in the right years develop faster. Those who do not spend months trying to reverse-engineer standards that are difficult to articulate.

The variable is access, not ability, and access has often been unevenly available, even within the same firm. Generative AI, used deliberately, can make that access more consistent and predictable than mentorship alone can deliver.

From there, Jeff lays out what the attorney digital twin actually looks like in practice, including what it takes to build a useful one, why your best work matters more than your most prolific work, and what separates a voice replica from a genuine thinking partner.

Read the full piece in the Daily Business Review.