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Anatomy of a Prompt: Providing Real Training for Using AI In Law Firms

By Sean A. Harrington and Andy Kim
September 30, 2025

With generative AI, research time has collapsed and review time has expanded. The model can draft in minutes, which means you now spend more time asking whether the draft is accurate, defensible, and on brand. Prompting skill is not about magic words. It is about shaping the first draft so the review phase is shorter and you are not fixing preventable mistakes. A good prompt removes ambiguity, narrows scope, and sets expectations. The better the prompt, the less the scramble at the end.

At ILTACon 2025, I co presented with Andy Kim, eDiscovery Counsel at Munger, Tolles and Olson and we tried something different. The typical slide deck on prompting is fine if the goal is to check a box. It is not fine if the goal is to create lawyers who can sit with a model and get useful work out of it. So instead of more slides, we put a room of about 150 people into a live, competitive exercise where they wrote prompts, saw scores appear almost instantly, and chased a leaderboard that updated every few seconds. The session was organized and emceed by Joseph D. Hufford of Manatt, Phelps and Phillips, who kept the energy high and the clock honest. It felt a little like moot court, a little like an arcade, and a lot like real practice when the deadline is not moving.

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