The American Bar Association's Litigation Section recently featured "Designing Persuasion: How Design Thinking and AI Can Transform Trial Advocacy," an article by Wilson Sonsini litigation partner James Yoon. In the article, James argues that generative AI, when paired with the “Design Thinking” framework, transforms trial preparation from an intuition-driven craft into a repeatable, testable discipline. After depicting a scene of AI-generated jurors testing competing opening statements in an evening, James walks through the phases of the Design Thinking process and shows how AI makes each phase practical at scale. His central claim is that AI amplifies the qualities that make great trial lawyers great and encourages humility in the preparation process as every draft can be treated as a prototype rather than a final product.

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*This article was first published in the American Bar Association's Litigation Section in August 2026.