Just as we start building competence profiles for lawyer licensure, here comes Generative AI to change what lawyers do. So let's combine these two trends and develop a critical new lawyer skill.
Great article - I recently came across your writing and have been enjoying it. The below provoked a few thoughts that I’d be interested to hear your perspective on:
“Maybe we don’t educate, train, and evaluate law licensure candidates on their ability to personally deploy these skills or carry out these activities, with or without any given technology. Maybe the core competence that we educate, train, and evaluate in lawyers is the ability to assess the quality and effectiveness of legal products and services and determine whether they’re fit for purpose — regardless of whether they were generated by machines, or people, or both.
Under this approach, you would encourage law students to generate essays, papers, and memos with the use of Generative AI (after first showing them how to instruct properly). But you wouldn’t grade their papers — you’d grade them on their ability to explain why the work product is or isn’t effective, valid, and fit for purpose. That would be a better measure of analytical, evaluative, and critical thinking skills.”
I’d argue that the ability to assess the quality of legal products and services is already the core competence of a good lawyer in the current system. As a lawyer gets more senior, they invariably spend less time producing work product and more time guiding, reviewing, and assessing the work product of their juniors. The expertise that enables this is why senior lawyers are able to demand high fees – they deliver value in a way few others can. The conventional wisdom is that this expertise is won through years of learning-by-doing and many, many corrections and lessons from more senior lawyers. While there are certainly many problems with the way law schools teach, I think that it would be a disservice to teach students only to review and not to do. This would be like teaching prospective drivers to spot mistakes in videos of old races, then sending them off to start their careers at the Nürburgring. Instead, I think we should focus on ensuring that students develop a clear understanding of the types of work that humans and AI respectively excel at. Then, when they enter practice, they can fully leverage AI to unlock the time needed to produce value-add work product that actually uses their intelligence and legal knowledge (unlike the typical junior lawyer assignment today). Hopefully, they’ll even get to sleep a bit.
I'm wondering - how can we teach students practical skills when they don’t know what area of law or type of firm they’ll end up working in? Perhaps GenAI can help with more personalized learning exercises & assessments...
Great article - I recently came across your writing and have been enjoying it. The below provoked a few thoughts that I’d be interested to hear your perspective on:
“Maybe we don’t educate, train, and evaluate law licensure candidates on their ability to personally deploy these skills or carry out these activities, with or without any given technology. Maybe the core competence that we educate, train, and evaluate in lawyers is the ability to assess the quality and effectiveness of legal products and services and determine whether they’re fit for purpose — regardless of whether they were generated by machines, or people, or both.
Under this approach, you would encourage law students to generate essays, papers, and memos with the use of Generative AI (after first showing them how to instruct properly). But you wouldn’t grade their papers — you’d grade them on their ability to explain why the work product is or isn’t effective, valid, and fit for purpose. That would be a better measure of analytical, evaluative, and critical thinking skills.”
I’d argue that the ability to assess the quality of legal products and services is already the core competence of a good lawyer in the current system. As a lawyer gets more senior, they invariably spend less time producing work product and more time guiding, reviewing, and assessing the work product of their juniors. The expertise that enables this is why senior lawyers are able to demand high fees – they deliver value in a way few others can. The conventional wisdom is that this expertise is won through years of learning-by-doing and many, many corrections and lessons from more senior lawyers. While there are certainly many problems with the way law schools teach, I think that it would be a disservice to teach students only to review and not to do. This would be like teaching prospective drivers to spot mistakes in videos of old races, then sending them off to start their careers at the Nürburgring. Instead, I think we should focus on ensuring that students develop a clear understanding of the types of work that humans and AI respectively excel at. Then, when they enter practice, they can fully leverage AI to unlock the time needed to produce value-add work product that actually uses their intelligence and legal knowledge (unlike the typical junior lawyer assignment today). Hopefully, they’ll even get to sleep a bit.
I'm wondering - how can we teach students practical skills when they don’t know what area of law or type of firm they’ll end up working in? Perhaps GenAI can help with more personalized learning exercises & assessments...