To AI-Proof Lawyers, Some Law Schools Restrict Technology

Even as the legal profession embraces generative artificial intelligence, some of the nation’s top law schools are restricting its use.

In May, the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, announced that effective this summer, students are by default prohibited from using AI in “conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit” to ensure “the best legal education possible for our students by equipping them to perform activities constitutive of excellent lawyering.” Last month, the dean of the law school at the University of Texas at Austin called on faculty to “make extensive use of classroom time to engage students in sustained and rigorous dialogue” by making sure students are “not distracted by (let alone relying upon) whatever might be taking place on their screen at that time.”

And late last week, the University of Chicago Law School announced that it will ban laptops, tablets and phones in the classroom for first-year law students beginning this fall as part of its broader strategy of adapting legal education for the AI era. The ban is intended to prevent generative AI from undermining the Socratic method, which has long been a hallmark of legal education; instead of spending class time lecturing, law professors probe students with questions about legal theories and principles.

“We think that that kind of exchange should happen without it being intermediated by machines,” Adam Chilton, dean of UChicago Law, told Inside Higher Ed. “There were already arguments about whether or not laptops made sense in classrooms, because they can both distract the student using them and the students around them, but those concerns are only amplified in the era of AI. You don’t want students simply putting in the case name into Claude or ChatGPT, asking it for a summary and the questions their professor is likely to ask, and then just reading those answers when you call on them.”

No ‘Robots Arguing in Court’

That’s because the ability to engage in live discourse and debate without the help of large language models is perhaps the most AI-proof skill aspiring lawyers can develop, especially as more and more law firms rely on generative AI instead of early-career lawyers to review and summarize legal documents.

In addition to banning phones, laptops and tablets in the classroom, UChicago’s law school is also adding an in-person oral exam component to the substantial research paper that all students are required to complete to get their law degree.

“[These restrictions] force students to think for themselves, be able to answer a question on the fly, listen to arguments, respond to arguments and think about what the reasons are for themselves,” Chilton said. “It’s exactly the kind of skill [lawyers] need in a high-pressure meeting with a client, a negotiation, hearing or a trial.”

And Chilton predicts that AI won’t supplant human lawyers’ delivery of oral arguments any time soon.

“I don’t think we’re going to have robots arguing in court for us,” Chilton said. “It’s still going to be humans that stand in front of a judge and stand in front of a jury and make oral arguments.”

But Chicago Law is also balancing its new AI restrictions with the reality that “AI tools are already widely available to our students, and our graduates will be expected to be prepared to use them in legal practice,” according to a memo announcing the policy changes. According to a recent report from the American Bar Association, 58 percent of lawyers have integrated generative AI into daily tasks like drafting correspondence and conducting general research, while 54 percent use it for brainstorming and 47 percent use it for summarizing documents.

While first-year students taking legal research and writing will be required to write without AI, they can use it to help with research, revisions and preparing for oral arguments—and a professor will provide feedback on both. According to the memo, this approach will allow students to “develop their own writing skills independent of generative AI tools while also developing their ability to supervise AI and critique its output.”

And like many other law schools across the country, UChicago Law will continue to offer elective courses that explore responsible, effective and ethical use of AI in the legal profession.

That’s also the aim of the new AI restrictions at UC Berkeley’s law school, which offers numerous courses on the intersection of AI and the law and allows instructors to deviate from the default AI ban “for courses designed intentionally to teach AI fluency (or for other courses for which the instructor decides a distinct rule is pedagogically appropriate),” according to the policy memo.

“We’re not in any way hostile to AI. We recognize the importance of it,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, told Inside Higher Ed. “But if a student is turning in work for a grade, it should be the student’s work and not AI unless the professor wants to adopt a different rule.”

He added that the policy is also about instilling accountability in future lawyers, especially as numerous practicing attorneys have faced punishment for filing court briefs containing AI-generated errors.

“When students are instructed about AI from the beginning of law school, they’re reminded that AI sometimes hallucinates cases, quotes and gets things wrong,” Chemerinsky said. “We’re teaching students that they’re responsible for the work they turn in. When you turn a brief in to court, you’re responsible for it.”