Rethinking Legal Education in the AI Era

I think this plan is really quite well-balanced and sane. Also kudos to UChicago Law School for including an actual implementation plan here, not just vague thoughts.

Some bits I found interesting:

[For required courses in year 1]

  > Across all 1L sections, we will prohibit the use of electronic devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones in the classroom.

  > Additionally, examinations will be in-class without access to the internet, electronic files, or apps. And most of all, we will continue our longstanding tradition of emphasizing the Socratic Method as part of these courses.

[For Legal Research & Writing year 1]

  > Throughout the year, students will write without AI, while also using AI for research, revision, iterating on drafts, and preparation for oral argument. Students and their instructors will review together both their writing and their use of AI.

[Electives]

  > For these courses, the use of the Socratic Method, no-device policies, and in-class, no-access exams will remain, but as default rules rather than required policies.
  > In all elective courses, we will encourage instructors to experiment with pedagogy.

[Upper level writing]

  > We will be adding one additional requirement, which is that all students will be required to engage in an oral discussion of their SRP with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting.

This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided.

Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. But this is “just another an AI cycle” and if you’re a practitioner it does look different than the previous ones.

However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies.

What you are actively seeing happening now are institutions saying “we have to change the way that we practice” “the way that we did business before is no longer as applicable as it’s going to be changing very rapidly in the future and we’re going to have to deal with that.”

That is not coming from investors or technology companies. That is coming from people who are utilizing this stuff and being impacted by it

So it is absolutely the case that there’s going to be some kind of financial changes but just like every other AI cycle we are left with a aggressively more capable technology that is more pervasive.

Everybody needs to be taking that seriously.