NBER working paper: RCT of 133 patent attorneys finds AI drafting help boosts junior performance, but only seniors retain benefits without AI

An NBER working paper reports a three-month randomised trial across eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms with 133 patent attorneys. Two-thirds were given Google Labs' unreleased AI assistant, "InFlow", for two patent claim drafting tasks, and they outperformed the control group at both 10 and 90 days, with bigger gains for juniors (under 7 years' experience). In a third task, redlining a patent draft without AI, only senior attorneys kept an advantage. Treated juniors showed no average benefit and a wider spread of scores. Google funded the study.

The finding is a measured data point, not a proof, that AI help can raise junior output without building the underlying skill. Law firms and other professional services firms that rely on juniors learning by drafting should think about how much unaided practice they keep in training. The evidence is narrow: one profession, one tool that the public cannot use, and a working paper that has not been through peer review. It supports caution, not a change of policy.

The "quietly stunt their professional growth" framing goes further than the data. The result is an absence of benefit for juniors on one unaided task, not shown harm, and the wider score spread suggests mixed outcomes rather than a uniform decline. Links to the "tragedy of the cognitive commons" and broader talk of expertise erosion are speculation. The coverage also leaves out how large the effects were, and with a small sample and a Google-funded study of Google's own unreleased tool, the results may not carry over to products people can actually buy.

1. 01Replication or similar trials in other professions or with commercially available tools (for example law, consulting, software), ideally with independent funding and follow-up beyond 90 days.
2. 02Peer-reviewed publication of the NBER paper, including effect sizes, confidence intervals and how the redlining task was scored and blinded.
3. 03Whether Google releases InFlow, or firms change junior training (for example required unaided drafting) in response, and whether any firm reports data on junior skill development.