There is a widespread assumption in professional services that senior lawyers possess a form of intuition that cannot be taught — an ability to see around corners, spot the issue no one else noticed, and reach the right answer by some combination of experience and instinct that junior lawyers simply have not yet developed.
This assumption is flattering to senior lawyers.
Daniel Kahneman's work on expert judgment — developed across decades of research and summarised in Thinking, Fast and Slow — reaches a conclusion that is uncomfortable for many professions.
When asked to explain what expert intuition actually is, his answer is precise:
"The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition."
What looks like intuition is pattern retrieval. A senior lawyer reads a set of facts and immediately senses that something is wrong — not because they possess special perception, but because those facts trigger a connection to dozens of similar situations stored in long-term memory. Their brain retrieves the relevant pattern faster than conscious reasoning can catch up, and presents the answer as a feeling.
Kahneman is explicit that valid expert intuitions develop when professionals have learned to recognise familiar elements in new situations — not through talent, but through accumulated exposure.
The implication is significant: if expert judgment is the product of pattern recognition built through experience, then the route to better judgment is more experience — specifically, more varied experience, encountered earlier.
The honest position is this:
The problem for junior lawyers is not that these patterns are unknowable.
It is that traditional training delivers exposure to them slowly and unevenly.
A trainee in a structured finance seat for six months will develop strong pattern recognition for structured finance scenarios and almost none for anything else. Their judgment at qualification reflects the narrow range of situations they happened to encounter — not the range they needed.
Simulation addresses this directly. A well-designed BeSavvy simulation is not a quiz or a knowledge test. It is a layered experience that combines multiple elements — narrative context, client communications, documents to review, decisions to make, consequences to observe — into a coherent scenario that builds memory in the same way a real matter does, but in a fraction of the time.
The platform is built around a set of distinct training blocks that can be combined within a single simulation:
— the underlying knowledge frameworks that connect experience to principle
By combining these elements within a single simulation, BeSavvy delivers a richer, more varied experience per hour of training than any single-format approach can provide.