AI literacy for lawyers: prompting is now a must

The Dutch legal profession faces a historic shift: alongside 19,000 lawyers, thousands of AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity are active in legal practice. With a new part of the EU AI Act taking effect on 2 February 2025, this development gains a new dimension. While many firms are still wrestling with ethical questions or limiting themselves to basic uses of Microsoft Copilot, they risk missing a crucial development: from early 2025, concrete requirements apply to the AI literacy of professionals who work with AI systems. Instructing AI tools effectively (“prompting”) thus becomes not only a practical necessity but also a legal obligation for the modern lawyer, no less fundamental than legal research, analysis and litigation. The obligation applies across the EU, so it concerns firms in Belgium and Luxembourg just as much.

A lawyer at work, generated with AI

The new dimension of legal expertise

This development requires more than superficial computer skills. It calls for a considered combination of legal expertise, systematic thinking and AI awareness. Firms that invest now in solid AI training teach their lawyers to write structured prompts. Take a lawyer reviewing a commercial lease clause, who asks an AI tool to assess it on: “1) conformity with the recent Dutch Supreme Court (Hoge Raad) ruling of 15 December 2024 on Article 7:290 of the Dutch Civil Code, 2) sustainability provisions in relation to the revised EPBD directive, 3) specific risks for the landlord under the new energy label system, and 4) case law from 2023 onwards on similar provisions.” A structured prompt like this produces a usable first analysis that still needs legal fine-tuning, but speeds up the process considerably.

Practical applications and organisational responsibility

The EU AI Act requires organisations to ensure, “to their best extent”, a sufficient level of AI literacy among staff who use AI systems. For law firms this is a concrete mandate to develop AI training programmes, introduce quality checks and draw up ethical guidelines. These requirements apply to all AI systems, regardless of their risk level.

When drafting court documents, a well-formulated prompt can serve as the starting point for a first draft that brings in relevant case law and statutory provisions. For legal research, lawyers can instruct AI tools to analyse large volumes of case law for specific legal developments or differences in interpretation. In contract review, AI can help identify risks and inconsistencies. These applications do not replace the lawyer’s work, but they enrich the legal workflow in ways that were previously unthinkable.

Reorganising legal practice

Bringing AI into modern legal practice, combined with the requirements of the EU AI Act, calls for a fundamental redesign of legal work processes. Law firms need to redesign their workflows around AI-supported processes, with quality checks and ethical considerations built in. That means investing in:

• Ongoing AI literacy training and education
• Best practices for different areas of law
• Quality checks for AI-generated output
• Drawing up and enforcing ethical guidelines
• A culture that encourages sharing knowledge about effective prompting strategies
• Regular evaluation of AI competences within the organisation

Two lawyers preparing for AI literacy, generated with AI

A new era for the legal profession

The urgency for the legal profession to embrace this development can hardly be overstated. Developments in AI systems follow each other at high speed, while the law sets concrete requirements for AI literacy. Firms that do not act now risk both an unbridgeable gap and possible sanctions under the EU AI Act.

The future of legal services lies in integrating AI effectively and responsibly as a complement to legal expertise, not as a replacement for it.

The lawyer of the future needs to be not only legally skilled, but also AI-capable: able to tackle complex legal questions with a combination of human expertise and AI support. This new reality calls for lawyers who understand both the technical and ethical sides of AI and can apply that knowledge effectively in their daily practice.

Firms that invest now in AI literacy and prompting skills are building not only compliance with the EU AI Act, but also their competitive position in a changing legal market. In the modern legal profession, more than ever: those who prompt, stay.