We have all heard it. AI is creating a generation of mindless lawyers who won’t know how to think. They won’t know how to write. They won’t know how to do research. They’ll just type a question into AI, copy whatever they get back and merrily send slop on its way.
And with AI, law firms will no longer have the tasks for young lawyers to do, through which they learn how to practice. Clients won’t pay for that anymore. So we either find another way to train young lawyers, or we wait for the day when those lawyers run the profession. Like robots. Producing not only AI slop but AI slop advice.
Traditional Law School Thinking
If we opt for the former, it shifts the focus to the law schools to take on this training role. Ahh, the law schools. You know the ones. They teach by the Socratic method. Casebooks. Core courses. One five-hour exam at the end of the year. They spend enormous amounts of time teaching students to “think like a lawyer” and precious little time teaching them how to be a lawyer. When you think of law schools, think Professor Kingsfield from the 1973 movie “The Paper Chase.” Yes, 1973. That’s kind of the point: most law schools are doing things as they have always done them. Some are even banning the use of technology and AI. That’s like driving at 120 miles per hour and trying to steer while looking in the rearview mirror. Brilliant.
The RelFest Panel
I attended a 45-minute session at RelFest (formerly, Relativity Fest) entitled “Shaping the Next Generation of Legal Professionals.” It was another one of those substantive nonsalesy sessions Relativity excels in, and I was all ears. It was supposed to be a three-person panel plus a moderator. The panelists were listed in the course description as April Dawson, professor of law and faculty director of AI initiative, Howard University; Bobby Williams, director, iDS/NExT; and Dorna Moini, VP, product management, Relativity and founder of Gavel. Relativity’s Adam Rouse moderated.
But when I walked in, to my surprise, none other than Dan Linna, director of law and technology initiatives at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, was also on the podium. I’ve known Dan for a long time. Once upon a time, he helped me try to develop a new way to handle complex cases by using ALSPs to do most of the work. And having the partner concentrate on and get paid for things only the partner could provide: judgment and experience.
It never got off the ground. Too many sacred cows. Too much change. But Dan was all in. He likes challenging norms. He was and is one of the leading thinkers in legal. When I saw him on the panel, I knew it was going to be a mind-bending session.
Law School Mavericks
And it was. Because this panel was not all about doom and gloom for law schools’ role in training young lawyers. They weren’t sitting around lamenting how AI was going to destroy legal education. Or detecting if students were secretly using AI.
Nay, nay, nay. This panel was all about the opportunities that AI holds for real training and producing graduates who are not like today’s first-year associates. Who are instead more like third- or fourth-year ones. And make no mistake, these panelists were all about rethinking law school from the ground up, not just tinkering with yesterday’s curriculum.
Consider what Linna is doing. He has created an AI Socratic tutor students use most every day. So instead of getting called on a couple of times a semester, you’re on the hot seat constantly. He’s also created coaches that give feedback on the work the students have done. He requires students to give in-class presentations.
He’s created an oral argument simulator and a simulation that forces a student to go through the steps to prepare for trial. And the beauty of all these tools is rather than the associate trying to grab feedback from a partner catch-as-catch-can, they can be used over and over. Believe me, I know how the other way goes. Partner stressed for time. Associate stressed for time. In bad moods. Both know the client likely won’t pay for time spent in training; got to keep those billable quotas in mind, you know. Neither fully invested. Linna, on the other hand, even takes time at the end of the course to meet with each student to ask them about what they have learned and the papers they have authored.
Dawson came at it another way. One of the classes she teaches is admin law. Not the sexiest course in law school, I know. But Dawson teaches it with what she calls a “tech focus.” She requires her students to use AI tools to accelerate their learning, not detract from it. She gives the students a reading assignment and then asks them to complete the reading using AI as a companion. She explained that when she was in law school, she might have to read an assignment, a case, or an opinion several times to understand it. Yep, I remember that all too well: it’s like starting a book in the middle and trying to figure it out.
But with an AI companion, her students can stop and ask the tool questions. What does this term mean? What did the judge mean by this cite and sentence? And so on. But here’s the important part. After reading what’s assigned, the student asks the AI tool to give them a Socratic quiz. The student then supplies Dawson with a link to the completed quiz so she can assess how they did and help them improve.
Another thing Dawson does. She requires her students in her other classes to use the tool for pro se litigants, Courtroom5. She uses AI to create a pro se persona. She then asks the student to be that person and use the Courtroom5 tool to see what it’s like for pro se litigants to try to navigate the system. To see what it’s like for the rest of the world.
It’s About Life Skills
The panel was also all over the need for law schools to teach life skills. Like human relations. Like design thinking. Communication. Project management. Williams put it well: “life is project management.” He also uses things like improv to help teach people how to deal with human situations.
All this and more is going on in the heads of these passionate people. They realize that while school is great and AI is great, the more important thing is to teach law students how to deal with the reality of practicing law. As Moini put it, you can prepare all you want in advance for an oral argument. But you don’t really know how well you know something until the judges start firing questions at you. Starting with the one you didn’t think of.
Simulations. Socratic tutors. Coaches. All things designed to give law students and, for that matter, young lawyers, the kind of real-life experiences they need to practice law.
But It’s Not Going To Be Easy
Let’s be clear though. This kind of thinking and doing requires, as Linna put it, a change in how law professors teach and how they assess what their students are learning. More quizzes, less reliance on the single end-of-the-year exam.
And as I listened, I kept thinking: this is really a rethinking of legal education. And that requires work. Requires law schools to rethink how and what they are teaching. It requires the courage to try and fail in the face of others in academia who scoff at change and what they are doing. It requires passion and putting students’ needs first. It’s a lot harder than standing in front of a class and teaching the same way you always have.
It also requires giving up a large piece of hubris. I heard a story once about a legal innovator who took what he thought was a good idea to a law school. The school rejected it, saying, “If it was a good idea, we would have thought of it.” Right.
But if what the RelFest panelists are doing and what others at innovative law schools like Vanderbilt and Suffolk are doing is any indication, we are in good hands. And we could be on the eve of better lawyers sooner, instead of more of the same. The kind of lawyers who drive looking ahead, not always looking in the rearview mirror.
Sorry, Kingsfield.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.
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