The years-long debate over whether the legal industry should adopt AI is mostly settled. The next question—what does it actually mean to use AI competently, and what happens when you don't?—took center stage at a Legalweek 2026 panel sponsored by Steno and led by Joe Stephens, JD, Steno's Director of Legal Solutions.
Above the Law covered the discussion, which brought together practitioners from Jenner & Block, Cooley LLP, and Jaspan Schlesinger Narendran to wrestle with questions the profession is still working out in real time. The takeaways are worth reading.
Here’s an excerpt:
Amid the legal industry’s ongoing shift from AI experimentation to AI implementation, a Legalweek panel explored a counterintuitive question last week: “If you’re *not* using AI, are you committing malpractice?”
Sponsored by Steno and led by Joe Stephens, the company’s legal solutions director, the panel drew inspiration from recent statements by Manhattan federal judge Jesse Furman, who suggested that failing to use AI could create its own legal risks, like fee disputes.
In addition to his role at Steno, Stephens serves as a clinical lecturer at Texas Tech University School of Law. Law students now have unprecedented access to information, he noted at Legalweek, but they also face a constant flow of new questions about how to utilize it.
“That, to me, is the interesting pivot here around this ever-evolving idea of ‘malpractice,’” he says. “We have this industry standard for how the profession has existed. Now, there’s this sort of complete interruption with the tech that we’re seeing be deployed.”
In a wide-ranging, hourlong discussion, the Legalweek panelists also explored the evolving definition of “competence,” the risks of “razzle dazzle” from AI applications, and parallels to pharmaceutical litigation, among other topics.
Here are some takeaways. (The panelists’ opinions are their own, and not necessarily those of their organizations.)
‘Rare-but-Serious Side Effects’
You wouldn’t think that AI tools have a close analogue in the pharmaceutical industry. But according to Shannon Boettjer of Jaspan Schlesinger Narendran LLP, there are strong similarities in how these products exist in the marketplace.
With both drugs and AI tools, there are inherent risks and there are inherent benefits, she notes. There are some uses that present major benefits and minimal risk, and some that produce fewer benefits and larger risks.
“When you take a drug, this is what I would suggest to you as a pharma litigator: Pull out those instructions and look for common side effects, and then keep reading down, and go to rare-but-serious side effects,” she says. “Rare-but-serious side effects are the really high-risk situations. We’re still figuring out what some of the rare-but-serious side effects are with AI.”
To find the sought-after uses that bring big benefits with lower risk, lawyers can start by leveraging tools to create items that are not the lawyer’s final work product.
“If you used to take 15 hours to do a deposition digest, and now you can have a tool digest for you and cut that down, it’s an enormous immediate benefit,” Boettjer says.
The human is still actually reading the depositions and creating arguments, she notes. And as long as someone higher up is involved in the process there’s little risk — including to skills development.
“The tedium of finding the pages and typing the pages, that did not make me the lawyer I am today,” she says.
Read the full coverage on Above the Law