Published: New Hampshire Bar News
Ἀρχὴ ἥμισυ παντός
The beginning is the most important part of the work - Plato
In 416 BCE, a veritable who’s who of Greek Philosophers gathered for a banquet at Agathon’s house in Athens that would become famous as Plato’s Symposium. Anyone who was anyone was there: Socrates, Aristotle, Phaedrus, Pausanias and Aristophanes participated. The controversial (and supposedly drunk) Athenian general Alcibiades showed up late. As Plato tells it, the dialogue was sparkling. The winning argument came from Diometa, via Socrates, convincing all that we must recognize beauty not just superficially but in souls, law and knowledge.
2,441 years later, on Friday, November 6, 2026, we will be holding a Symposium, Counsel for the Future, here in New Hampshire. Being serious-minded, flinty New Englanders, our purpose will be more practical than the original Symposium. We are going to address the question of how we are going to train, mentor and learn from the next generation of lawyers. It will be hosted at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law in Concord.
The challenges that we face as a profession are profound. The destabilizing technology of Artificial Intelligence is just one of them. High school, college and law school students may not have the same rigorous writing training or learn the essentials of critical thinking as students of the past. It will become harder to evaluate the work of new lawyers, and more importantly to know whether they actually understand the written work they generate.
Students who pass the bar exam now are taught only a sliver of what it means to be a lawyer. Only 7% of all cases that go to court have a lawyer on both sides. There are vast communities of underserved or unserved people needing legal help. We need to do everything we can to make sure that the next generation of lawyers is “practice ready” as effectively as possible. We need lawyers who are not just technicians, able to ask Claude or Harvey or ChatGPT the right question, but counselors who can guide clients, become judges, prosecutors, public defenders and protectors of the rule of law.
Many of us, me included, have had the benefit of training and mentorship. And mentorship, as I have said before, is not simply older lawyers teaching the new ones. Young lawyers have much to teach about how technology can help our clients. Too often, however, it has been a matter of luck – being in the right place, at the right time with the right person – who got that helping hand. We want to gather as many as we can to invigorate and inspire people to give their time to the future of our profession.
So how are we going to do it? We plan to have educators, lawyers of every stripe, judges, court staff work together to share their thoughts, as the philosophers did. We will have outside professionals help us work on techniques for mentorship, training and giving feedback. We will learn how to be a better mentor and mentee. There will be homework, before and after the Symposium. This is not going to be easy or completed in a day. But then, we are still discussing Agathon’s dinner party two and a half millennia later.
All are invited to participate (except maybe Alcibiades). Sign up early because seating will be limited. You will get CLE credit. But like the original Symposium, you will come away appreciating the beauty of knowledge and the law. Most importantly, you will want to pass that appreciation along.