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AI has fundamentally changed my litigation practice. Effective adoption means treating AI as a vehicle you steer to accelerate your work – not a self-driving car

Philip Holdsworth
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As published on CanadianLawyer

By Philip Holdsworth

I’ve been practising commercial litigation for nearly ten years – ten years of my life measured in six-minute increments.

Over the last two years, I’ve been steadily integrating AI into my practice. Today, I utilize enterprise-grade tools daily. They’ve transformed how I plan, execute, and deliver work.

The efficiency imperative

Non-lawyers (and many lawyers) are incredulous that we still bill in 0.1-hour units. Yet for complex, non-routine work, no better system has emerged. Clients pay for access to our cognitive bandwidth and the judgment that comes with it.

Tracking time this closely creates pressure to be relentlessly efficient. Every six minutes counts the same, even though not every task carries equal value. That has always made me uncomfortable. Actual value lies not in each unit, but in the cumulative outcome for the client.

That’s why AI has been such a game-changer. It lets me shift more of my limited time toward the parts of my job that matter most.

Augmented capability

I often tell new lawyers that developing capacity means filling “buckets of competency” – research, drafting, advocacy, communication, judgment. Practising law is akin to playing a multidimensional board game governed by statutes, contracts, and common law. The real skill is knowing what’s relevant.

Technology has always expanded our ability to process information, but generative AI does more: it helps synthesize, summarize, and test ideas.

Practice management

I draft thousands of pages a year. For most of my career, I thought of drafting as two halves: the first 80 percent – assembling facts and structure – and the last 20 percent – refining, perfecting, and polishing. AI compresses both. It can extract facts, organize evidence, and check consistency in a fraction of the time. The result isn’t replacement – it’s amplification.

Even my writing rhythm has changed. Where I once spent hours labouring over phrasing, I can now generate variations instantly. The focus has shifted from “How do I say this?” to “What do I need to say?”

Day-to-day, the work may seem mundane – but it’s transformative. AI helps me:

  • Summarize affidavits with paragraph references.
  • Extract dates to build timelines.
  • Compare clauses and flag differences.
  • Reorganize arguments into factum outlines.
  • Generate neutral case summaries or first-pass notices of motion.

These are the building blocks of litigation – the tasks that test bandwidth. Having a tool to accelerate them, while still demanding verification, has fundamentally changed how I work.

Understanding the risks

Adopting AI isn’t risk-free. The cautionary tales are already well known. Long before using it, I was reading about algorithmic systems. One author compared AI to driving a car: you don’t need to build the engine, but you must know how to steer, accelerate, and brake.

AI tools are advanced prediction machines. Trained on vast text, they generate language by predicting the next word, guided by an “attention” mechanism – the steering wheel – that weighs relevance. Framing the question well is half the skill.

Like any system, AI can overfit or miss nuance. Outputs can sound convincing but still be wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. The key safeguard remains what it’s always been: verify everything.

On confidentiality, the concerns mirror those raised years ago about cloud computing. Enterprise platforms don’t train on client data and use security standards equal to or exceeding those already required for sensitive legal work. The bigger risk is that we, lawyers, rely on outputs without checking them.

Looking forward

AI hasn’t replaced my judgment – it multiplies my capacity to exercise it. It enhances the buckets of competency I’ve spent a decade building. It allows me to spend less time grinding through documents and more time analyzing, advising, and advocating.

It has made me more of the lawyer I wanted to be: focused on substance, not syntax. The mountain of work hasn’t disappeared, but the climb is faster – and the view from the top, clearer.

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