Extract from Nathan Damweber’s article “From Casebook to Copilot: Bridging Law’s AI Readiness Gap”
Welcome to the Practice…Now Use AI! A new associate walks into a law firm on her first day. She has studied torts, contracts, and constitutional law. She can brief a case and draft a memorandum.
What she is unlikely able to do, however, is effectively utilize and evaluate the output of the generative AI tools her firm expects her to use. She is statistically more likely to have studied the Erie doctrine than to have been formally taught how to effectively use AI tools in the legal profession.
An early adopter of AI tools myself, I typically begin legal recruiting and interviewing discussions with two questions: Are you using AI tools in your legal studies, and is your law school preparing you to use AI in your future practice? The customary answer to both is… “not really.”
This striking pattern has recently emerged in my conversations with many students—law schools are not meaningfully preparing future lawyers for the AI revolution already reshaping legal practice. Indeed, 1Ls from three different top-tier schools recently informed me that the extent of AI use in their legal education has been limited to a single exercise in which professors ask them to critique a practice-exam answer generated by an AI system. Astonished by these anecdotes, I dug into the research.
