AI Goes To Law School

Some law schools are beginning to consider what their relationships with AI could look like.

Over the last year, artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant inroads into the legal practice. And as AI’s presence increases, law schools are beginning to consider what their relationship to such technologies could and should look like.

Daniel Rodriguez, dean of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, announced earlier this fall that he would be stepping down after 14 years at the post. Although Rodriguez will remain part of Northwestern’s full-time faculty, he is now also slated to join AI-based legal research company ROSS Intelligence in an advisory role to help the company build out its law school and access to justice initiatives.

Having watched a great deal of promising technology in legal fade into irrelevance, Rodriguez said it can be tempting to treat AI like the latest fad. He believes, however, that AI is likely to become a more permanent facet of legal practice. “AI both as a technology and its use in law is here to stay. It’s a question of not whether but how fast,” he said.

Rodriguez said that given the increasing pressure on Big Law to adopt and use AI-based technologies in their practices, law schools are looking to give students a baseline familiarity with AI. While he believes this is likely to initially happen in elective coursework, the rapid expansion of AI may inspire law schools to adopt the technology more deeply into their curriculum.

AI 101

While the idea of educating law students about AI may seem pressing from the business side, relatively few of the traditionally top-ranked law schools have jumped at the prospect of weaving AI or other technology into their curriculum. Among the U.S. News & World Report top 20 ranked law schools, only a handful have legal technology-related coursework, and even fewer offer hands-on practice.

Outside of these rankings, law schools are increasingly considering and experimenting with different ways to integrate AI and analytics into their curriculum. Georgia State University College of Law’s new Legal Analytics Lab is one such effort to apply the methodologies developed around big data for business applications to the unstructured data now available around legal questions.

Charlotte Alexander, an associate professor of legal studies at J. Mack Robinson College of Business and director of the school’s Legal Analytics Lab, explained that familiarity with AI and machine learning technology is quickly becoming an important skill for young attorneys. “Students at least need kind of a basic working knowledge of the different types of tools that are available, and the different ways to go about using those tools,” she said.

Curricular opportunities for students at the lab are still being worked out, but Alexander noted there may be opportunities for law students to use the lab as a means of developing an applied understanding of AI.

Gabriel Teninbaum, director of the Institute on Law Practice Technology & Innovation at Suffolk University Law School, has similarly designed the school’s engagement around applied learning. “We here try to do things from the practical standpoint. We want to teach people how to use this stuff,” he explained.

“We are focused on getting students ready for what’s next. There’s no doubt that AI is part of that,” Teninbaum later added.

Through the law practice technology concentration, Suffolk looks at various examples of how AI can play out in legal practice, from expert systems up through predictive modeling. The school also is home to a legal process outsourcing center run in partnership with Integreon Inc., which gives students an opportunity to apply predictive tools and work directly with actual clients. “They work on real-life client engagement that Integreon brings to our group,” Teninbaum said. “It’s an opportunity for our students to get trained on their software and get paid.”

Education in Practice

While these skills and technologies clearly create opportunities for new law school graduates, Alexander does not believe that new attorneys are now expected to be fully fledged data scientists and coders to compete in the modern market. “I don’t think it’s the case that every lawyer graduating from law school needs to be able to code in Python, but it may be useful to know that it is possible to use machine learning tools to create certain predictive models,” she said.

Rodriguez noted that while there are many business applications for AI, law students can also benefit from understanding the potential applications of AI to broaden access to justice.

“If we can help students understand that technology, and specifically AI, can create a much more streamlined, efficacious means of connecting lawyers to consumers of legal services, and reorient or recalibrate what it means to provide legal services by lawyers, then that’s an enormous benefit for us as legal educators in educating our students to the value and capacity of law to provide access to justice,” Rodriguez said.

While the potential applications of AI can seem vast, Rodriguez said that part of helping students navigate this technology is about understanding both its potential and its limitations. To that end, he sees a key role for law schools in helping to shape the development and use of AI technology for the legal sector. “It enables law students, faculty, and staff to provide necessary input to the extremely sophisticated tech people in these companies to understand more than our business model, but our education,” Rodriguez said.

While clearly legal technology companies are keen to educate law firm attorneys and staff about their products, Rodriguez has seen many of them misunderstand the role and importance of law schools in trying to both build and market their software.

“What the Achilles’ heel of many of these companies has been is an insufficient understanding of what legal education is about, its history, its structure, its constraints and its objectives,” Rodriguez said, adding that while his comment may seem like a traditionalist defense of long-standing legal education pedagogy, it actually just points to a key difference between the business and education institutions in law.

“In legal education, we’re about the education of lawyers for a changing marketplace, but there’s also a core value in our curriculum and our objectives,” Rodriguez added.

Rodriguez encouraged legal technology companies to tap into the potential of law schools to build meaningful inroads and productive relationships with students and faculty who can help iterate their products to be valuable to their future legal work.

“I suspect that for all the great penetration that companies like ROSS and others have made into the law firm ecosystem, what has got to be frustrating at times is why they are encountering such resistance not just from the older generation, but from the younger lawyers,” Rodriguez said, noting that younger attorneys may not necessarily see the value a particular piece of software may add for their careers and law practices reflected every piece of new technology.

“It has to start in law school, it has to start in the training and education of new lawyers,” Rodriguez said.

Originally published at www.legaltechnews.com.