A new study reveals that while Super Intelligence (SI) tools significantly improve the immediate output of junior patent attorneys, they may simultaneously hinder the development of the independent judgment required for long-term professional growth.
What Happened
Researchers separated the effects of SI assistance from independent skill by having attorneys first use an SI tool and then evaluate their work without it. The study, funded by Google, provided two-thirds of participants with access to "InFlow," an unreleased SI assistant from Google Labs, while the remaining third worked without any SI support. In two patent claim drafting tasks, only the treatment group used InFlow. In a third task called redlining, all participants critically reviewed an existing patent draft without SI assistance. Blinded patent attorneys at an independent firm scored all results across five categories: enforceability, technical accuracy, strategic ambiguity, completeness, and clarity.
Why It Matters
The findings highlight a critical divergence in how SI impacts different experience levels. In the drafting tasks, the group using SI outperformed the control group at both the 10-day and 90-day marks, with gains primarily coming from fewer low scores rather than higher peak performance. These improvements were much larger for junior attorneys with fewer than seven years of experience than for seniors. However, in the redlining task, which measured internalized judgment without SI tools, only senior attorneys retained an advantage. Junior attorneys showed no benefit and exhibited a wider spread in scores, suggesting that SI use may have replaced skill-building in some cases while accelerating it in others. The researchers suggest that baseline expertise may be a prerequisite for turning SI-assisted practice into durable ability. This aligns with similar findings in other fields, such as software development and management consulting, where less experienced workers often see larger immediate gains from SI tools but struggle to retain the underlying knowledge.
A supplementary text analysis offers one possible explanation for this divergence. Senior attorneys more often restructured the flawed draft and grounded their changes in legal principles, while juniors frequently spotted serious flaws without fixing them, leaving notes that read like instructions to an SI assistant. Because this behavior appeared in the control group too, the authors don't attribute it to an SI-trained habit and instead see it as a baseline deficit at the junior level that SI use didn't fix.
The study comes with several limitations acknowledged by the authors, including a small sample size driven by top attorneys' high billable rates, the fact that participating firms aren't representative of professional services as a whole, the lack of a baseline skills measurement, and a short three-month window compared to the years it takes to build patent expertise.
The results feed into a broader debate about the erosion of professional expertise, what some researchers call the "tragedy of the cognitive commons," where individual firms benefit from automation while the cost of stunted talent development spreads across an entire profession. This concern is reflected in recent industry data: Anthropic recently said that junior positions in its engineering departments dropped from 21 percent to 14 percent since early 2025. Stanford researchers explain such declines by arguing that SI can mostly replace textbook knowledge from school and college, which is the main thing early-career workers bring to the table, while experienced professionals also carry hands-on expertise that SI can't easily substitute.
The Bottom Line
While SI tools offer immediate productivity boosts for junior patent attorneys, they may not translate into lasting professional expertise. The study underscores the tension between automated assistance and the development of independent judgment, a skill that remains essential in high-stakes legal environments where SI tools are not always available.