It is the best of technology. It is the worst of technology.

It is Artificial Intelligence, and it is more than a topic of conversation in law schools, law firms and courthouses. Already, it is being embraced, anticipated … and feared.

The discussion of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, at Salmon P. Chase College of Law arose more than a year ago. On the best side of the discussion: a pioneering course, the Law and Artificial Intelligence, with other courses being developed. On the worst: concerns that AI machine-learning could write and answer for some students what they could not do themselves.

Whether good or bad, like most historic and recent technologies, AI is here to stay, and law students and lawyers need to understand it.

“The arrival and inevitable growth of AI in law schools and the legal profession warrants careful planning coupled with humble agility,” Dean Judith Daar explains. “A core service that lawyers deliver is the accumulation, analysis and presentation of information, tasks arguably performed by generative artificial intelligence systems. Now is the time for law schools to embrace these large learning models for their power to increase access to justice, improve efficiency in the profession and expand connections within the rule of law. We must educate our students in the optimal ethical use of these powerful tools so they can serve tomorrow’s clients with distinction.

For law students, the ethical issues actually underpin their substantive knowledge.

“There are several ethical implications surrounding a lawyer's use of AI, which is why it is crucial that students learn to be responsible and ethical consumers of AI (after they learn the foundational skills necessary to practice law, such as legal analysis and legal writing, without relying upon AI),” says Danielle Lewis, director of trial and appellate advocacy programs, who has written and spoken on AI issues in practice. “Law students should be aware and wary of the limitations of generative AI, including its ability to ‘hallucinate,’ or to provide false information. There are also significant confidentiality concerns involved with sharing any client information with an AI program.”

Both the initial AI-related course at Chase and another next academic year delve into the core issue of usage and underlying issue of ethics.

In Law and Artificial Intelligence, students explored the impact of AI in such areas as criminal justice, torts and commerce, and in the general practice of law. There was attention to understanding the ethical, legal and technological challenges ahead when they enter practice and AI is more prevalent.

In a course being developed for next academic year, Artificial Intelligence, Technology and Social Justice, students will learn how to use AI to benefit social justice and access to justice, and how to avoid traps of racial, gender and other biases that can be learned into AI.   

On the worst side of the use of AI in law schools is a concern that some students could use it to cheat on papers and tests.

“One concern is that law students will be tempted to rely upon generative AI programs to assist them with fundamental lawyering skills, such as reading, writing and legal analysis, instead of learning to perform those crucial skills without assistance,” Lewis says. “Without developing those skills independently of generative AI programs, law students will not be fully prepared to enter the practice of law.”

In an early attempt to thwart any temptation to cheat, the Chase faculty this past year strengthened the student honor code prohibitions on plagiarism and academic dishonesty to specifically prohibit use of AI, unless allowed by a professor for a legitimate purpose.

“After one professor in a faculty meeting raised his concerns about how some students might try to pass off AI-generated work as their own, faculty members started thinking seriously about the potential for abuse in a technology that at that time had not fully entered the mainstream conversations,” says Associate Dean and Professor Lawrence Rosenthal, who oversees academic programs and honor code compliance. “As a result, the faculty looked at our policies on academic integrity and decided that while they would apply to AI just as much as cutting-and-pasting from the Internet would, the potential for AI to go beyond ‘borrowing’ a paragraph here and there made it important to specifically address the issue.”

Now, for both good and bad, AI has joined such standbys as torts and contracts in the curriculum.