In parts 1, 2, & 3,¹ we discussed:
- LawNet AI, which features AI-generated summaries of cases not already headnoted (i.e. summarised) by Justice Law Clerks, who will continue to do so;
- the (mis)use of headnotes and AI-generated summaries (collectively, "Summaries"); and
- why Summaries cannot take away all the pain.

In part 4, we'll consider whether there is a point to the pain.

--

Before we go further, let me make it clear that I am no masochist.²

And legal practice is challenging enough that I see no point in artificially creating painful scenarios solely as a training exercise.

However, I suggest that it is precisely because legal practice is challenging, that there is value in lawyers building our capacity to withstand punishment.

After all, at some point in your career, you may well be faced with the situation where:
- you are thrown an urgent brief at 5pm and told to prepare a research memo by 9am the next morning;
- you are instructed to take out an urgent injunction, and the voluminous cause papers will have to be prepared and filed in a matter of days;
- you are given several ring files of historical documents, and are told to digest them, extract the most important documents, and brief your senior by the end of the week;³
- you're on a driving holiday, but your spouse has forgotten their driver's licence, and so you only have a couple of hours each day to clear deliverables for ongoing deadlines. If you take longer, you risk being locked out of the scheduled accommodation at your next stop every evening;⁴ or
- you have to finalise written submissions over the course of a week, but lead counsel is travelling for work - almost 60 hours (round-trip), to a jurisdiction with a significant time difference - and drafts will have to be turned around with mathematical precision⁵ to take into account flight times, transit windows, and work schedules...⁶

... and the list goes on.

I will go out on a limb to suggest that our ability to field such situations competently is dependent on whether we have had previous opportunities to train our resilience.

And we train our resilience by being exposed to, and overcoming, painful challenges.

--

Now, some of you may be thinking:

"Big deal! My role doesn't require this, so this is not a muscle I need to train!"

You may be right. I won't argue, you can stop reading now, and I'm sorry to have wasted your time with the preceding paragraphs.

But I will suggest that for those of us who want to go far in legal practice, who want to be entrusted with interesting, exciting, and high-stakes matters, and who want to be at the cutting edge of the law...

...such resilience is, at the very least, helpful.⁷

And that, I think, is the point of the pain.

--