Lawyers need to follow Nate B. Jones, an AI-first product strategist and former Amazon Prime Video head, to stay relevant. Master prompt engineering and context design like engineering tasks, not just tool use. Lawyers who build their own AI agents and think like software engineers will gain a competitive edge.
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If you're a lawyer and you plan on still practicing law 5 years from now, you need to be following Nate Jones. Nate is an AI-first product strategist. He's the former head of product for Amazon Prime Video, and now he has become a leading guiding voice for professionals and businesses who want to use AI deeply. He's not just talking about tools, he's explaining how they actually work in plain English. One of the things that he has said is that we need to talk a lot about prompting. Human language is pretty vague, and even though these models are fairly intelligent, they're not incredibly reliable at inferring your intent if you are not precise. And here's why that matters for you as a lawyer: you can't just use AI; you have to understand it. You have to become, as Nate puts it, someone who engineers prompts, engineers context, engineers workflows while still being an attorney because effective. Prompting transforms AI from generic output into precise, productive assets. And those lawyers who can build their own AI agents and integrate them into their workflow, who start thinking like a software engineer and an attorney, well, they're going to stand out. Nate even draws kind of an analogy. You would literally bring your little punch card to work and start using the AI in a way that is Very much like insert it and pull it out, insert it and pull it out. So this isn't some nice extra skill. It's a survival skill for the modern practice. And I'm going to drop Nate's links in the description so you can go follow him, study his work, and start leveling up now.
