Law taught me professional writing is a team sport. Now, AI can be your team.

The pros always get support—and with AI, you can too

I’ll have you know I made this without AI, and I’m not good at design. It occurs to me that both of those facts are probably obvious from looking at it.

I. Professional writing isn’t solitary

Like most, I learned to write in school, and it was a lonely affair. I studied English in college, so I spent countless solitary hours in my room or the library trying to eke out a string of paragraphs that dissected the Jungian archetypes of Hop on Pop¹ or whatever.

Feedback was sparse and collaboration was non-existent. If I was lucky, I might be able to get a patient classmate to listen to me think out loud a little as I tried to find a thesis. And of course, after I turned a paper in, I would get it back with some red ink marks from my professor, along with a few bullets of comments. Usually.

This seemed normal to me—I understood writing to be a journey you mostly make alone. Like the Camino de Santiago: Each morning you strap on your backpack, put some ointment on your blisters, and hike ‘til you drop. That’s how Hemingway did it, the crusty old coot.

It turns out I was wrong—about the Camino, about Hemingway, and about writing. Veteran Caminoers tell me that making friends from across the world is the best part of the experience. Hemingway relied heavily on an editor and friend named Maxwell Perkins. And when I became a lawyer, I learned that top-level writing is produced by teams.

Team writing is the gold standard. I don’t care how independent or brilliant you are: the best process isn’t a lonely pilgrimage, but a caravan. In Parts II and III, I’ll show you exactly what that looks like, drawn from my real-world professional experience.

But like any gold standard, access is a huge issue. The writing process is time-intensive and laborious, and quality teammates are busy with their own lives and projects. So most people—especially independent and creative writers—will simply never have the luxury to write with a full complement of helpers. Or at least, not until they are rich, famous, or established.

But all that has changed. Because in my experience, artificial intelligence, used discerningly, can not only be your team, but also give you a level of support that is shockingly close to the gold standard.

I want to show you how to do this yourself—and I will. But first: this is not a list of “10 tips and tricks for using AI to write copy (doctors hate them!!)” There’s enough of that online already. And most of it was probably written by AI the bad way.

Instead, this two-part essay is intended to distill some of the most important lessons I’ve learned about writing, which I picked up from working on teams with world-class masters of the craft.² I hope to help you develop a philosophy for using AI in your writing process, so that you can unlock its incredible benefits and avoid its very real dangers. And to get to that point, I need to lay some groundwork first. But if you will follow me on this journey, I truly believe I can revolutionize your writing process at zero cost to your artistic integrity.

Ready? Let’s begin.

II. The three people you meet in writing heaven

Most writing teams have a similar structure, made up of three basic roles. I am going to call these:

1. The Writer

2. The Supporter

3. The Polisher

I have performed each of these roles too many times to count, and in many different contexts: creative writing, academic writing, legal writing, and journalism, to name a few. And whatever the context, those three roles show up every time—though sometimes under different names and slightly different job descriptions.

Some names you might see for the Writer are: author, law partner, professor, or judge. It’s their ideas, their voice, and their words that matter. Their name goes on the piece. To use a sports analogy, this is the athlete. This is what I assume you want to be, if you’re reading this. And it’s a role you must never cede to AI—though we’ll get to that later.

The Supporter also has many aliases: clerk, associate, beta-reader. Most commonly, they’re simply the “editor.”³ Think of them as the coach in our sports analogy. Their job is to improve the quality of the Writer’s output. They test the Writer’s ideas with incisive questions. They identify blind spots and flawed reasoning. They help recognize the heart of the piece and ensure it’s the focus. They keep the Writer on their toes and slash away their bloated prose. They are neck-deep in the substance of the piece with the Writer: a sounding board, a gadfly, and a shoulder to cry on.

Finally, there is the Polisher. You might know them as the final reviewer, the proofreader, or most commonly, the “copy editor.” They come in at the end and get the piece from “finished” to “publication-ready.” They are usually disconnected from the substance of the piece. This is a feature, not a bug: it gives them the space and objectivity needed to ruthlessly weed out any remaining mistakes. They might also take a last look at the claims and citations of the piece, making sure everything is accurate and fairly represented. When they’re done with the piece, it’s done. While not a perfect fit, their sports-world analogue might be the referee: they’re impartial, keep their eye on details, and make sure that all the rules are followed so the outcome is beyond reproach.

If you can get three (or more) talented people skilled in these roles to work together, alchemy occurs. But it doesn’t happen by accident: it follows a proven process, which I’ll outline now.

III. A well-oiled writing machine in action

Anyone who has written anything even semi-seriously will be familiar with the four basic steps of the writing process. Again, monikers may vary, but I’ll call them: (1) conceptual development, (2) drafting, (3) revision, and (4) final review.

I want to take you deeper into each of these and show you what these stages look like when they’re carried out, not by an individual, but by a team.

Step 1: Conceptual development. Everything starts when the Writer has something to say. Some ideas are big, some are small, but almost all need development. Sometimes that looks like expanding and filling gaps; other times, stripping away and honing in.

In a writing team, the Writer develops their thinking hand-in-hand with a Supporter. My favorite experience working as a Supporter came clerking for judges. There, the prewriting stage was a blast because it usually meant lively face-to-face conversations. You’d be amazed at how much your clarity of thinking can improve when you can talk through your thoughts with a real person—an hour of quality conversation could save many hours of agonizing drafting. But it doesn’t have to be verbal, either—email and instant chat work great too. You just need a medium that lets you wrestle with the ideas together.

In our prewriting discussions, a judge might explain how they intend to rule and on what grounds, as well as how to dispense with the parties’ various arguments. My goal as a Supporter was to call out potential counterarguments for my judges, to help them think through what concepts were central and what were just footnotes, and to react in real time to possible theses and potential structures. By the end, you should come away with a robust blueprint or road map.

Step 2: Drafting. Now comes the part most of us think of as “writing.” The Writer gathers food and supplies and a flare gun and goes off into a dark forest of anguish and ecstasy until they capture that elusive chimera: the Strong Draft.

This part really is a solo affair, and for good reason: you want to respect your Supporter’s time. I’ve written before for online journals, and I’ll tell you that if I had sent my editor a “rough draft”—underdeveloped or with obvious mistakes—my reputation as a writer in their eyes would have taken a hit. And that’s not something most writers can afford. It’s the Writer’s job to come up with something that is reasonably close to their best work. And so Writers working alone still have to go through all four steps themselves. Without a team, that’s the entire process. With a team, the Writer’s full cycle becomes just one iteration of the loop, nested inside a broader collaborative process. That means, unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. But fortunately, your writing gets much, much better with others involved—as you’re about to see.

Step 3: Revision. Now that the Writer has a strong draft, it’s time to call the Supporter back in…for murder. Murdering darlings, that is. This classic publishing term captures the agony of watching your beloved prose get slashed down like so many vapid teenagers in a Krueger film. It’s a task that only a second person can fully carry out. Writers aren’t supposed to get emotionally attached to their work until it’s finished, but virtually all of them do. (After the work they’ve put in, can you blame them?)

Though this may happen with comment bubbles or bullet points in an email, the ideal weapon for this massacre is “track changes,” which allows you to visually identify every deletion, correction, and addition made by the editor.

Working at a law firm, I’d send my work to the partner on the case, and they’d turn on track changes and do beautiful violence to my precious draft. They’d knock down my walls and throw out my ratty furniture. They’d take sentences I thought were well-crafted and make them twice as potent with half the words. Reorder some paragraphs, reframe the intro and conclusion—and suddenly, the piece would jolt to life. That’s the power of an expert substantive edit.⁴ Reviewing tracked changes from master writers taught me more about writing than probably any other experience.

After several back-and-forths between the Writer and the Supporter, the piece should sing. After all that grueling work, it now appears perfectly effortless.

But you’re not done yet.

Step 4: Final review. Once the piece is done, then it needs to be finished. It’s ready for the Polisher. This might be the Writer or Supporter wearing a new hat. But ideally it’s a third person who has no prior involvement with the piece. That distance and objectivity helps the Polisher notice and mercilessly root out any remaining flaws. They’re primarily looking for “non-discretionary” changes—objective mistakes.

My second year of law school, I was a lowly staffer on the University of Chicago Law Review. And my job was to be a Polisher. The Writer (a professor) and the Supporter (an upperclassman editor) would get the piece finalized, and then it would get sent to me with the instruction: “make this perfect.” In most legal writing, there’s actually two polishing stages: the first is a “cite check,” which makes sure that every claim is supported with a reference and every reference is accurately characterized. Then a second staffer would do a “proof,” which was intended to catch every typo, errant punctuation mark, and style guide violation.⁵

The last way that Polishers can improve a piece is a little tricky to explain. Because a Polisher can suggest changes to the language of the piece, but with a limited scope. At this point, neither the Writer nor the Supporter probably wants a suggestion that changes the meaning of a sentence or moves ideas around.

But, for example, say passive voice is used: the Polisher could flag that and suggest a revision that strengthens and tightens it without altering the meaning or the sentence’s particular expression.

Hmmm…no. How about: “But the Polisher might flag and fix passive voice, for example.”

Ah, much better! See what I’m talking about?

The Writer could reject these changes—after all, they’re technically discretionary. But are they really? Look at that example above and tell me you would reject that suggestion. It’s like a spray tan on a body builder—superficial, but with high aesthetic impact.

After this final coat of lacquer, the piece should pretty much read itself. It should feel like each word is the inevitable consequence of the word preceding. There’s nothing like it.

And now, at long last, the piece is done, and it’s time to hit publish. If you’ve made it this far, my congratulations to you. If you’re the Writer, then you’ve written a piece, start to finish. You’ve had help and support along the way, but the piece is unquestionably yours, and you should be proud of it. You’re now invited to celebrate in the traditional way of writers (sobbing quietly in the corner out of abject shame and terror).

IV. AI is a dream team at your fingertips

I cannot overstate how rigorous and valuable this process can be. At every stage, the quality of your writing is pushed to the absolute limit by intelligent partners.

If you can regularly write with a team like this—one that sharpens your thinking and helps polish your prose on a full-time basis—I would say: Congratulations! You’re set. You either have talented and irrationally generous friends—or you have the money to buy such friends. Or maybe you’re Malcolm Gladwell. If that’s you, you can stop reading now.

But the fact is, I know that almost nobody has this luxury, especially when it comes to their creative writing. You might be able to get a thoughtful friend to read and give you some comments on a draft once in a while. But unless you have a dedicated team in the trenches with you, you’re going tragically under-supported in your writing.

And now we’re finally ready to talk about AI. Because incredibly, AI can be the team you never knew you needed.

Or at least, something surprisingly like it. If you know how to use it—which isn’t a trivial “if”— then you can get astonishingly close to what it feels like to work with a group of brilliant minds on your projects.

As a very active writer myself, I am blown away every single day by the magnitude of this privilege. Used well, AI can be both a Supporter and a Polisher on call 24/7—and surprisingly good ones, in my experience. And you get to be—you must be—the Writer: the generator, the brains, and the voice.

This is the kind of support that every good writer deserves, but so few can afford. To reach a level where you can hire a team of intelligent editors and proofreaders, you have to put years, maybe decades, into climbing up the professional ladder. But you, whatever level you are, have access to something like a high-caliber, language-oriented mind whenever and however you need it, for a monthly subscription to your favorite AI.

In Part II, I’ll show you exactly how I do (and don’t) use AI in practice—a step-by-step view over my shoulder as I replicate the team writing process that I grew to cherish as a professional legal writer. I’m going to help show you how to use AI to its full potential, all while keeping your authorship—and humanity—sacred and inviolate. I hope to see you there.

1. My term paper for the ever-popular class, “ENG 342: Rhymed Verse in Camelot Era Juvenile Literature.”

2. This isn’t an exaggeration. By an inconceivable stroke of fortune, I was mentored by someone who now sits on the United States Supreme Court—along with several other writers of comparable caliber.

3. When people hear “editor,” they often think of copy editing, like catching typos and the like (the purview of what I call the “Polisher” in this piece). But the role I’m describing here is a substantive and developmental one. So to avoid confusion, I’ve opted to call them the “Supporter.”

4. Editors usually have broad cutting powers but typically don’t propose their own language for you to include. That’s not the case with law partners, who often rewrite your draft from scratch. That’s because they’re not actually the Supporter—they’re the Writer. Their associate is the Supporter. But in this case, associates often get to take a crack at the first draft, which saves the partner time, saves the client money, and gives the associate good experience. So it’s a win-win-win. I’ll touch more on this in my next essay in this series, but I want to be clear that I don’t recommend that you let AI play either the partner or the associate role in your writing.

5. Most people find this work tedious. But some people—the types who get excited about the difference between effect (n), effect (v), affect (n) and affect (v)—and who are mad that I left out an oxford comma there—absolutely love it. (I see you, baby.)