Extract from Ella Sherman’s article “Yale Debuts New Law’s AI Future Course, Taught by Lawyer Turned Technologist”
This fall, Yale Law School launched “Law’s Artificial Intelligence Future,” a new course that explores artificial intelligence’s uses in the legal industry. It’s one of several AI-focused initiatives the law school has introduced this semester.
The course is led by Abdi Aidid, a visiting professor from the University of Toronto who has a background in legal tech, having previously served as the vice president of research from 2018 to 2022 for Blue J, a gen AI-powered tax law research platform.
Aidid sat down with Legaltech News to discuss how he designed the course, how students are engaging with it, and how the idea for the course came about in the first place.
What prompted the creation of this course at Yale Law School?
So the course is my own creation, I’m a lawyer, law professor, legal technologist. I practiced law for a number of years as a commercial litigator and then I transitioned to legal technology in 2017. …
I teach “Law’s AI Future,” I teach intellectual property and I’m teaching a course of privacy and data governance. My goal in all those courses is to teach them through the lens of these new, challenging, emerging technologies. Yale in particular has had a lot of interest in developing coursework, research, events, [and] activities around AI because I think they recognize that the legal profession has to contend with the kind of totalizing power of artificial intelligence. It’s beginning to have legal, doctrinal, ethical policy impact.
