UP or OUT

Your employer can put off buying an AI tool. Can you afford to put your own development on hold for just as long?

“I’ll start learning when we get it at work.”

That is an understandable position. Employers should provide the tools needed for the job. But are you prepared to put your professional development in their hands too?

While one company is still debating a licence, a lawyer at another is already experimenting, making mistakes, checking results and learning. They are gaining experience that no licence can buy.

I see the difference in my own contract work.

A thorough review of three contracts can take me a full working day. Depending on their length and complexity, I need to assess risks, check compliance with company requirements and applicable law, make amendments and prepare comments.

When the company’s requirements and acceptable deviations are already defined, a specialised AI tool can, in my experience, make certain stages of this work several times faster. I still have to check the output and exercise my own legal judgement. But I get to that point sooner.

That is why “my employer isn’t ready yet” does not convince me as a reason to put off getting started myself.

Getting started does not mean buying a licence straight away. You can watch demonstrations, use training materials and try a tool with a sample contract you have written yourself. Test what it spots, what it misses and how well you can instruct it.

Using work documents does require company approval. Paying for your own account does not resolve that issue.

The conversation with management also changes when, instead of saying “we need AI”, you can propose a specific trial: one type of contract, a defined period, agreed rules for data use and a process for checking the results.

Measure the time it takes to produce a finished, checked document, including the time spent correcting AI errors. A quick first draft is not a finished job.

Then the discussion is about tangible benefits for the business: faster contract turnaround and more time for complex issues.

Your employer decides whether to buy a licence. You decide whether to build your skills.

If your company still isn’t ready a year from now, will you still be where you are today?