Tyler Austin, BPP Careers Development Consultant, on using AI, avoiding over-reliance and showing recruiters the thinking behind your work
Aspiring lawyers thinking about how to use AI in their applications should start with one word, according to Tyler Austin, BPP Careers Development Consultant: “intentionality.” Students shouldn’t panic about the technology, and they shouldn’t lean on it blindly either. What matters, in his view, is that they can explain exactly why they’re using it, where it’s helping, and what remains their own work.
A career built around student employability shapes how Tyler thinks about all this. After studying law at City University of London on a law and commercial pathway, he moved into an employability and students’ union hybrid role at City Students’ Union before taking on a careers advisory post at York St John. He has now been at BPP for about two years, where his role in the Future Talent Development team involves helping students work out which areas of practice and which jobs interest them, while giving them “a space and a toolkit to tackle recruitment in a more confident way.”
Once the conversation turns to AI, that practical grounding comes through quickly. For Tyler, the real problem isn’t that these tools exist, but the thoughtlessness with which some students use them. “If you do not know why you’re using it or what you want to get out of a particular tool or prompt, you are not in the right space to use the software,” he says. Treating AI as a machine for instant answers, in other words, misses the point. Students should instead be asking what part of their answer it’s actually improving, and whether that improvement stays authentic to them.
Copying and pasting from a chatbot, Tyler is clear, does not count as good use. “The idea of copying and pasting what a Large Language Model tells you is one of the most frightening things ever,” he says, warning that candidates “may end up with polished-sounding content that misses the points they are genuinely trying to make.” A better approach, in his view, is using “targeted prompts that build in critique.” He suggests asking the tool to challenge its own output, or using it to interrogate why a particular question matters and how different perspectives fit together. Exchanges like that, he says, can produce something “so much more nuanced and powerful than just regurgitating what the tool tells you.”
Whether law firms should simply permit AI use in applications is a question Tyler answers with some care. Rather than a straightforward yes or no, he frames the issue as one shaped by the market and by what different firms are trying to offer their clients. Some firms are investing heavily in proprietary AI tools, which makes familiarity with the technology a genuine advantage for candidates. But even then, he draws a line between candidates who say “I use AI daily” and those who can show they know how to “utilise AI” when it’s appropriate. The real question, for Tyler, is whether a candidate’s AI use brings a “cultural and practical benefit” to a particular firm and its clients.
Things get more interesting still when firms use AI themselves in recruitment, something Tyler describes as “a big quandary.” Graduate recruitment teams are often small, and he understands the appeal of AI-assisted systems that help them review large numbers of applications more efficiently and, potentially, more consistently. If firms are “saving resources screening candidates,” he suggests, some of that saved time could be returned to applicants in the form of better feedback and how to navigate these emerging tools.
Spotting an AI-written application, according to Tyler, is harder than most people assume, since the best use of the technology is often hard to detect at all. “Good AI use is an integrated element of the response, not the response itself,” he says. The bigger issue is poor use, especially hallucinations: misstating what a firm does, inventing a conversation with someone there, or even getting the firm’s name wrong are, unsurprisingly, catastrophic. More subtle clues include generic, conceptual descriptions of a sector and a tone that feels overblown. “AI loves using buzzwords to pull out an emotional response,” Tyler notes, adding that when he’s “feeling more than seeing evidence, the tone doesn’t fit.”
Students worried about becoming too dependent on AI get much the same advice from Tyler: pause and ask what the tool is actually for. “Whenever you engage with a tool, ask: why am I using it?” he says. A search engine may serve better for straightforward fact-finding, while AI can genuinely help when the goal is to uncover an angle you hadn’t considered or to test your own thinking. He also speaks warmly about using it as a “roleplay toolkit,” a way of rehearsing how someone else might respond in an interview or application context, since saying an idea out loud, even to a machine, can expose weak points in your reasoning.
When asked which skills matter most for future trainees as AI becomes more embedded in the profession, Tyler splits his answer into practical and conceptual categories. On the practical side, he points to due diligence, careful handling of data, attention to detail, digital literacy, and the ability to spot errors and articulate risk. The skills he keeps returning to on the conceptual side, though, are deeply human: empathy and connection. Building relationships and common ground remains vital in a commercial environment, he argues, and just as important is accountability. Aspiring Lawyers can’t treat an LLM as the “real truth” and themselves as a mere mouthpiece; they have to be able to justify their process, explain their source material, and stand behind their advice.
Helping students move past the stigma around AI toward a more practical understanding of how it fits into professional life is, at BPP, what this comes down to for Tyler. While he’s careful not to say careers development consultants “teach” AI, they do run workshops and share best practice, and academic and professional services teams receive training on efficient use as well. The aim isn’t to encourage students to outsource their thinking, but to help them use these tools in ways that are realistic, responsible, and aligned with the workplace they’re preparing to enter.
One piece of advice closed out the conversation, offered to candidates applying for vacation schemes and training contracts and rooted in first principles: “Recruitment is about risk versus reward.” A candidate’s job, Tyler says, is to make it “logically sound” that they’re both competent and culturally aligned, treating the process as a chance to share rather than merely to prove, and being open about professional and non-professional experiences alike. As he puts it, “if a tool reduces effort, there is always a flip side cost,” and for some candidates, that cost is losing the ability to defend and explain their own work under pressure.
Tyler Austin will be speaking at ‘How to use AI in training contract applications — with BPP’, a virtual student event taking place TOMORROW AFTERNOON (Tuesday 21 July). Apply now to attend.
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