By Chantal McNaught, PhD Candidate at Bond University
The Mirror the Legal Profession is Avoiding: Reflections from the Australasian Law Academics Association 2026 Conference
Transparency statement: GenAI was used to assist with compiling summaries from handwritten notes and iterating on drafts of this post. GenAI was not used to directly draft or polish the text.
The revelation from the 2026 theme for the Australasian Law Academics Association Conference (ALAA 2026) of ‘Educating the Reflective Lawyer: Human Wisdom in an Automated Age’ is that the people thinking most seriously about what lawyers need to survive the next decade are largely not in law firms.
As a researcher, lawyer, and legal technologist, I occupy an uncomfortable middle ground between legal academia and practice. Reflecting on what I observed over two days of presentations, conversations, and corridor discussions, I concluded that it was not a conference about pedagogy. ALAA 2026 was primarily about professional survival, and the profession itself has not noticed yet.
What is Reflective Practice?
Prior to attending, I thought I knew what reflective practice was – journaling and ‘reflecting on’ an experience or learning. Whilst this is true, Dr Michele Leering’s keynote address expanded my narrow understanding; it is a disciplined methodology for developing professional judgement.[1]
Reflective practice is more than just journaling, and it certainly is not rumination, regurgitation or rationalisation. Reflective practice is the positive act of reflecting on the self, critically, and can be collective and should be integrated. Reflective practice enables us, as professionals, to obtain clarity on the change we seek. Dr Leering, argued that reflective practice enables professionals to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty.
Importantly, reflective practice, when done well, is the structured and uncomfortable habit of examining one’s own reasoning, assumptions, blind spots, and responses to uncertainty. It is how a lawyer learns to sit with the fact that the ‘right answer’ is genuinely unclear, and yet still make a sound, ethical, justifiable, and accountable decision.
Legal educators at ALAA 2026 did not discuss reflective practice as a ‘nice-to-have’. Reflective practice was presented as the foundational capability from which ethical reasoning, professional identity, resilience, self-awareness, and tolerance of ambiguity all flow. Dr Leering framed it as a metacompetency. On reflection, I understand this as the operating system in which professional judgement runs.
Lawyers Operate in a VUCA Environment: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous
We live and practice in what organisational theorists term a VUCA environment: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. The legal profession is at the centre of this environment, with pressures applied from multiple directions: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), clients, institutions, the courts, and the economy.
The rule of law is not a passive infrastructure. It requires lawyers who can exercise judgement in genuinely uncertain conditions. It requires lawyers who can reason ethically when precedents are thin, the technology is novel, the client instructions are ambiguous, and the regulatory framework does not contemplate the situation at hand. It requires people who can tolerate these conditions and still act responsibly.
GenAI creates more pressure in all dimensions of VUCA environments, not less. When GenAI can produce a first draft of most legal documents that appear to have sound legal reasoning, what remains is what GenAI cannot do: verify, contextualise, take responsibility, exercise judgement, and maintain the relational and ethical presence to the rule of law. Lawyers of the future are not the ones who have learned the most prompts but who have developed the reflective capacity to understand what GenAI is doing, what it is missing, and when not to employ it entirely.
Importantly, reflective practice is not the opposite of efficiency. It is the condition in which efficiency remains trustworthy.[2]
The Academy and the Profession have Diverged
It is my opinion that legal education is ahead of the legal profession in the deliberate, research-informed development of reflective capability. Legal educators are designing a curriculum that specifically cultivates the habit of reflective practice for curating the conditions in which the legal professional identity is formed. Universities are doing the work that law firms have not yet begun to take seriously.
Presentations at the conference highlighted how legal educators are inculcating reflective practice habits, assessing supervision relationships, and providing psychological safety for learning from error in a profession that treats any error as a catastrophe.[3] The mission is to produce graduates who are trained to examine their own reasoning.
Then those graduates enter firms where the prevailing culture is to “just get it done”.
This is not a criticism of legal practitioners – law firms are under genuine commercial, competitive, regulatory, and relational pressures – but the downstream cost of this efficiency culture is the atrophy of exactly the reflective capabilities the profession now needs most.
Further Reflections: the CPD Problem
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is the profession’s primary mechanism for lifelong learning. Whilst it is mandatory, it is, by most accounts, broken in its current use.
The predominant CPD culture within the legal profession is transactional. Lawyers attend CPD sessions to accumulate points. They select programs based on convenience, cost, duration, and familiarity with the topic rather than those that represent a genuine developmental challenge. They may receive a certificate, record the hours, and return to their daily work without meaningfully engaging with or integrating any new knowledge. This is ultimately checkbox compliance dressed as professional development.
The adult learning research shared at ALAA 2026 is unambiguous about how reflective practices create durable change. Passive consumption does not work. Real capability, which the CPD system aims to achieve, can only be attained through the active process of reflection that challenges existing mental models and creates productive discomfort. That discomfort is the feedback that new capability is being built, stretching the individual’s previous competency limits.
The legal profession has access to world-class evidence-based professional learning, yet largely ignores it for the easy, passive, and comfortable checkbox compliance model.
I acknowledge that this is a cultural challenge, not a structural one. The culture that treats the time it takes to experience intellectual discomfort as unacceptable inefficiency – conflating busyness with competence – and regards reflection as a luxury rather than a necessity is going to be a challenge to change.
What Legal Educators Offer the Profession
Legal education has developed something the profession desperately needs: a deliberate educational philosophy for cultivating reflective capability in adults under pressure.
The specific methods matter less than the underlying principles. It is clear the principles in desperate need in the profession are: professional development that requires practitioners to examine their own reasoning, supervision frameworks that treat reflective conversation such as Pause. Reflect. Connect as a professional obligation rather than a managerial burden, CPD programs designed around productive challenge, rather than information delivery, and a cultural permission to say “I am uncertain, I need to think about this” or “I got that wrong and here is what I learned.”
This is not an opportunity for the profession to further outsource the development of reflective practice to universities. Rather, it is an opportunity to take what the academy has learned and build it into how experienced lawyers supervise and mentor junior lawyers, how the firm designs internal training, and how CPD is commissioned and evaluated. Graduates entering firms with reflective habits become catalysts for that change; but only if the profession creates the conditions in which those habits are valued rather than extinguished.
Rule of Law Stakes
The rule of law depends on lawyers who can exercise sound judgement in genuine VUCA conditions. That capacity is not self-maintaining – it must be cultivated, practised, and protected. In a world of accelerating complexity, where GenAI is reshaping legal work faster than regulatory frameworks can govern, reflective practice is not an optional professional development learning outcome. It is a professional obligation inextricably linked to the professional identity.
I left ALAA 2026 with a deeper appreciation for reflective practice and its centrality to lawyers who uphold the rule of law in our society. It is not a question of whether reflective practice matters, but of how we cultivate the core skill in the profession and not just within the boundaries of the academy.
[1] Michele Leering, ‘Setting Our Sights on Transforming the Legal Profession to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century: Situating Reflective Practice as an Enabling Metacompetency’ (Keynote Address, Australasian Law Academics Association Conference, 2 July 2026).
[2] Craig Horton and Lauchlan Pevie, ‘Using AI to Enhance Metacognition and Reflective Practice in Legal Education’ (Conference Paper, Australasian Law Academics Association Conference, 2 July 2026).
[3] See, Jeremy Boland, ‘From Prison Classrooms to Negotiation Tables: Reflective Practice as a Core Legal Competency’ (Conference Paper, Australasian Law Academics Association Conference, 3 July 2026); Tammy Johnson and Judith Marychurch, ‘Beyond Doctrine: What Are We Actually Teaching Students About Being Lawyers?’ (Conference Paper, Australasian Law Academics Association Conference, 3 July 2026).