Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode Expertise?
A three-month randomized controlled trial involving 133 patent lawyers found that AI assistance improved the quality of drafting tasks for all participants. However, when tested without AI, only senior lawyers showed significant improvements in professional judgment, while junior lawyers exhibited polarized performance outcomes. The study suggests that foundational expertise is a prerequisite for extracting durable skill gains from AI-assisted practice.
- ▪AI access increased the quality of patent drafting tasks by 0.34 standard deviations at 10 days and 0.38 standard deviations at 90 days.
- ▪Senior lawyers outperformed control groups by 0.32 standard deviations in AI-free judgment tasks, whereas junior lawyers showed no average gain.
- ▪The performance of junior lawyers bifurcated, resulting in fewer mediocre scores but an increase in both poor and high-quality outcomes.
- ▪The study was funded by Google and pre-registered in the AEA RCT Registry in May 2025.
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| Original publisher | NBER |
| Canonical URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w35720 |
| Publication time | Mon, 14 Sep 2026 04:27:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-14T04:31:52.413Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-14T04:31:52.413Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | J5yzNmwIOamU · 1 stories |
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| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Home Research Working Papers Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode… Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode Expertise? Evidence from a Three-Month Field Experiment in Patent Drafting David Autor, Tanya Rodchenko, Josh Martin, Zanna Iscenko, Scott Strand, David Pearl & Melissa Ferere Share X LinkedIn Facebook Bluesky Threads Email Link Working Paper 35720 DOI 10.3386/w35720 Issue Date September 2026 Whether AI assistance builds or erodes professional expertise is unsettled. In a pre-registered three-month randomized controlled trial, we gave 133 practicing patent lawyers at eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms access to a custom AI drafting assistant and measured both their performance while using AI and their professional judgment afterward without it.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at NBER.