The school said Wednesday that use of the technology has been a part of early foundation courses at the school during the 2024-25 academic year, noting its goal of preparing future attorneys to work with emerging technologies. Additionally, AI instruction is being offered as an elective course and an upper-division seminar.
Professors Megan Hutchinson and Nicole Phillips, the incoming co-directors of the school's legal research, writing and analysis program, said the university doesn't teach AI as an add-on to legal education.
"Instead, we're integrating it throughout our legal research, writing and analysis program because AI isn't a separate skill or tool, but rather an integral part of how lawyers work today," the professors said in a joint statement Wednesday. "We want students to treat GenAI as a tool that demands legal judgment, clear communication and ethical awareness."
The two are also affiliated faculty with the school's Center for Law, Tech and Social Good, which supports the integration.
"Technology is reshaping legal work," they added. "We're making sure our students are ready not just to keep up, but to shape the future of the field."
The new curriculum teaches students how to use AI in legal analysis, how to evaluate AI-generate legal content, how to use iterative prompting to revise and improve AI outputs, how to accelerate legal research using the software and how to approach ethical issues, including confidentiality and bias.
Ruth Alcantara, a first-year law student, said in a statement Wednesday: "In class, we've explored how we can use AI to support our research process, to make our legal writing more effective, to develop the judgment to know when and how to use it ethically and as a resource to practice our oral argument skills. I now feel prepared to go into my summer job knowing how to work with these constantly changing tools."
Since the emergence of generative AI, the technology has made its way to law schools. Institutions like Washington University in St. Louis and Arizona State University have added AI courses to their curricula, while professors have hypothesized about using ChatGPT to quiz students more effectively.
A study published last month that involved 127 law school students at the University of Minnesota and the University of Michigan found that newer artificial intelligence programs such as OpenAI o1 and vLex's Vincent AI accelerated the completion of legal work and provided satisfactory, if not perfect, results in litigation-oriented tasks.
Last year, legal technology companies raised about $4.98 billion in funding, with AI being a significant driving force behind the new capital.
--Editing by Robert Rudinger.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
