AI’s Role in Shaping Tomorrow’s Lawyers: The Lessons Law Students Are Learning

Episode Notes

Transcript

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Announcer (00:03):
Web 2.0 innovation collaboration software, metadata got the world turning as fast as it can hear how technology can help legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to the Kennedy-Mighell Report here on the Legal Talk Network.

Dennis Kennedy (00:29):
And welcome to episode 383 of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

Tom Mighell (00:35):
And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy (00:36):
In our last episode, we continued our annual tradition of sharing our own personal technology resolutions for the upcoming year. In this episode, we wanted to talk about AI again, but in the context of teaching AI to law students. Not surprisingly, I get tons of questions about this topic in my own approach to it. We thought it might be good to share my thinking on this episode and also get Tom’s feedback and recommendations for me. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell (01:07):
Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will indeed be discussing teaching AI to law students. In our second segment, we’ll answer a question from our listener chat, GPT, acting as a stand-in for you, our audience. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, teaching AI to law students. Listeners know that Dennis teaches a class called AI and the Law at Michigan State University College of Law, and has been doing that for several years now. He also teaches a legal technology class at the University of Michigan Law School that has a lot of AI content that’s featured in it. Dennis wanted to brag about the work of his students and their final papers from last semester. I thought that it might be good to talk with Dennis about his classes and his approach to give him that opportunity. There’s a lot of conversation about artificial intelligence and legal education these days, but not a lot of detail about what’s actually happening. I’m not hearing what’s actually getting taught in the schools, and so I thought it would be interesting to learn more about it. Dennis, I suspect this will primarily be me interviewing you. What did I miss in the setup?

Dennis Kennedy (02:19):
I think you got most of it. A couple things that I would mention and then that I’ll ask you. I’ll let you ask me whatever questions that you want. But yeah, I think that you see of this, it’s not a huge number of classes in AI and law and there are a number of different approaches. So I don’t think you see universality yet. And I think a lot of the AI is being, and I’ll talk about this, is sort of being pushed into the legal research and writing world where you see some AI stuff and there’s some doctrinal AI stuff and a few other things, but I think there are pockets of these things happening and a lot of different approaches. I don’t think there’s a standard curriculum, which makes sense to me because I shift what I teach every semester and really shake things up, which I’m doing this semester.

(03:20):
So I think it is a fascinating area. There is a lot of talk about it and a lot of people saying they’re doing it, but a lot of people who I talk to are actually doing an AI class at their law schools for the first time, and they’re sort of designing it by hand, even though my syllabus and some other syllabus, syllabi, are out there. But I think it’s important to think of the lay of the land. And I was thinking that last year I taught AI probably to about 60 law students between two schools. And it wouldn’t shock me if I found out that I taught more students about AI than anybody else on the planet. I don’t know that for a fact, but I think it’s still a fairly small population, but less of interest.

Tom Mighell (04:18):
So what does that mean when you say there’s lots of interest? How much interest is there?

Dennis Kennedy (04:22):
So in my classes, I cap them at 20 and I get sellouts. I mean, they’re full. Some students have joked with me that it’s like Taylor Swift tickets that they’re actually on the registration page trying to get in. So I actually now offered the class in both the spring and the fall semester at MSU because there was enough demand, but even now it’s mainly three Ls who are able to get into class. So I think in terms of the class being offered, it fills up. So I think there’s interest in that. And then we’re also doing some other things around AI to kind of pick up the slack because there still are limits on that. And the reason there are limits is there’s one me and it’s a final paper class, and Cat Moon did this thing where she accidentally had a class where they ignored the cap or didn’t work in the signup, and she had 120 people sign up for a class that was supposed to be 20, and she went ahead and did it was during covid, but I’m not going to do that. So I have that sort of 20 cap with a really solid final paper, and that is kind of a constraint. So you have a number of constraints you have to work with.

Tom Mighell (05:48):
So let’s talk about your approach. You indicated that what you’re seeing others do is there’s a little bit of all over the place kind of an approach. What is your approach to the subject with your students?

Dennis Kennedy (06:01):
Well, I decided to do take it from a perspective of what was my practice, especially at MasterCard and how I would look at these things and then combine it with my approach to law practice technology. So there are things that I think you have to cover, but I’m not doing a purely doctrinal class. And part of the reason this stuff just moves too fast and there aren’t answers. So because recording this that last week, I actually say, yeah, last week if I were in the AI class and if I were doing something that was more doctrinal and talking about regulations, we’d be talking about how the Biden executive order on AI and the people would be reading it and we would be discussing it and figuring out the implications of it. And then today that’s gone, right? It’s completely gone. So I think that you have that.

(07:02):
So what I’m trying to do is to say, can I do something that’s partly simulation, get people to apply things. I want to get them up to speed on the basics of ai. I want them to try things and I’m doing lots of group work, simulations, papers, reflections, I call ’em, and then a final paper at the end with a three minute presentation. So my idea is that I want to get them comfortable with the ai, how it works. They don’t have to be experts. I want them to understand how it works. I want them to have the frameworks they need to ask the questions that they can become good lawyers to think about. I want them to understand how to think about policy, how lawyers should have a voice in that, how the regulatory framework is going to work all in the context that I’m kind of doing something different for them than what they’ve found so far in law school, which is they’re used to having a course and I go out and I do research. There’s a precedent, I find an answer and I know what to do on the basis that in a new technology like ai, most of the time there’s no answer, but you still have to give advice and you need to know how to analyze it. So I’m trying to give them the tools to do that. So very practical or reflects what I did at MasterCard, but also tries to give them confidence and some comfort about actually using the AI tools.

Tom Mighell (08:34):
So sounds like with that approach, with hitting them with information from lots of different angles and lots of different vectors I would call it, it sounds like you’ve got to do a lot to keep up yourself. And also that you say that things are changing so fast with ai. If you’re not keeping up then not doing a service to the students, what do you do to keep up on the latest developments in artificial intelligence?

Dennis Kennedy (09:01):
Well, I think, yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, it sort of reflects on the patterns in my career when there were times when I was getting up to speed on the internet itself. In the early days, it MasterCard, a lot of blockchain, other new technologies. So it’s just one more approach to that. And so I have the frameworks, the tools that I often use. It’s part of what I teach. It’s like what do I need to know? Where do I learn that? How fast do I have to learn it? What is expected from lawyers? Lawyers don’t have to know the details of the math behind neural networks and how they underlay large language models, but you have to know enough that you can ask the right questions and see the issues. So I use those frameworks and then I have my sources that I look at, so I get the information coming in the same way that I always have.

(10:06):
There are authors I read, there are newsletters, there are podcasts, there’s video, and then for me, a lot of the stuff with generative AI is you just got to get hands on and use it, which Tom from doing the podcast with me is sort of what I really enjoy doing. And then applying that to say, okay, if we know these things and we know this is how it works and we apply it to law, what are the implications both in the practice and in how we work? And we have to think in terms of we’re in a world where there’s not regulation that’s either exists or is understood, and we’re in a legal system where it takes probably four years to go from a case being filed to it being fully resolved in a technology that moves incredibly fast.

Tom Mighell (11:04):
So when I hear you talk, and what I think totally makes sense for this is that instead of necessarily learning about the nuts and bolts of the technology or to learn about the philosophy of artificial intelligence or the history of that sort of stuff, this is intended more about taking away and learning practical skills related to ai. How do you do that with the students? How are you imparting that practical knowledge and helping them gain those skills?

Dennis Kennedy (11:36):
This semester I’m doing, I’m really experimenting more with simulations and to say if we have, and I use a lot of scenario planning matrices. So I say if we’re living in a world of where the rate in law is low, runs from low to high, and we might say in the regulatory is either light or heavy, then we have sort of four boxes and we can see what things look like the future potentially looks like, and we have to be able to build in some adjustments. So when you have a change in administration, we’ve just had a lot of the assumptions that you would’ve made a few months ago have switched dramatically. So you’d say, I would expect this to be lighter regulation. I would say, my guess is after the tick attack case, we’re going to see national security is driving a lot of regulation and that has certain implications.

(12:40):
So how as a lawyer, if I’m advising people, especially businesses in ai, how do I do that based on what I see out there? What is the regulation likely to be as students and as lawyers? I think that it’s imperative that lawyers become part of the discussion around policy and regulation. And that’s what I encourage my students to do. But I’m basically also sitting down and saying, I’m doing the simulation where I say, you are going to be the AI committee of your law firm, and here’s the managing partner comes to you and says, we need a client facing AI product or service. Figure out what that’s going to be. I would say, here’s the simulation we’re doing. Next week is about AI evidence, and I have a group that’s going to be looking at things from the plaintiff side. We’re just going to do this.

(13:38):
This is early in the semester. So simple, self-driving car, auto accident, plaintiff’s lawyers, one group defense lawyers, the other group judges another group and the client side from another group. Have the discussion, see how that all comes back together, see how we think about things in different ways, what are the issues? And part of that simulation will be around what are the implications of AI when it comes to our traditional world of evidence. So we could talk about defects in that, but actually to me it’s more interesting to say what happens if AI puts all of the evidence in a case? It makes it questionable. What does that mean as a lawyer? What do I do as a judge? What is it that I can trust? Those sorts of things. So that simulation piece in a lot of different ways, both as a lawyer in actual, I would say the lawyer work and the firm setting and is trying to get them to think in different ways about what the implications of AI might be.

Tom Mighell (14:48):
Is there a final exam that you have at the end of semester?

Dennis Kennedy (14:52):
The last exam I ever took was, other than the driver’s exam when I moved to Missouri, was a bar exam. I never want to take an exam again in life. So this is a final paper class. I think it be really difficult to do an exam class for this. And plus I want the students to produce papers that really kind of show the savvy that they develop about AI and address some really important issues and then also papers that can be published and also really work for them as they go out to the job market. And so there’s actually been a fair number of students who’ve had their papers in my AI class published and in this last class, which is they did just a fantastic job. I hope to see a really good number of those published and I know some of the students are already working on that.

Tom Mighell (15:48):
Alright, well I have a few more questions for Dennis about his AI in law class, but we need to take a quick break for a message from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy (15:58):
And we are back. Tom, what else do you want to know?

Tom Mighell (16:01):
So we’ve talked about I think a lot of the advantages, the good things, the things that make the class strong. What do you see as the biggest challenges to a class like this?

Dennis Kennedy (16:13):
Well, what surprised me this semester kind of across the board at both the law schools I’m at is they’re students have used the word afraid when it comes to ai. And that surprised me a little bit. You say

Tom Mighell (16:29):
They have or have not,

Dennis Kennedy (16:30):
They have. So I’m going to work with them on that. That I think is interesting. And that I think comes from the lack of clarity and consistency from the law schools in the policies about how they can use AI. So some of that is there, some people have worked in firms where they don’t allow AI at all. So it is really confusing, I think, to students. So that’s the challenge. That one’s pretty manageable. I think the surprising challenge to me, and frankly this takes me back to my days as a very poor law student, is that the $20 a month, the AI tools that we take for granted is really a significant expense for law students. And if people would say, well, if they don’t go out and have beers once a week, then they can totally afford this. Well, seriously, and I’m always like, and this comment always gets made by lawyers who are the worst when I say, oh, you need to get the $20 a month version, and Tom, you and I have had this conversation and lawyers go like $20 a month.

(17:51):
Wait, Microsoft copilot $30 a month, there’s no way. So I think that that cost the consistency of tools and there’s still a lot of confusion out there. And so I’m trying to figure out some ways to work on that. I like what University of Michigan has done is that they have the enterprise chat GPT, and then they’re developing off of that. So students know that they have a tool that they can use and it’s sort of free to them as part of the tuition. And I’d like that approach actually. But it was my class at the University of Michigan where I heard the word afraid a number of times in my class this morning. So I think those are the challenges. And then I’d say the speed this stuff is moving, how you got to keep adjusting what you’re teaching and what you present. And then the interests that people have will evolve throughout the class.

(18:53):
So I sort of feel like I’m always co-creating the class with the students. And then I’m also trying to figure out this AI class, you’re typically an outlier. So you have a lot of other classes where you have faculty who don’t want to use AI at all. And that kind of creates this a little bit of confusion for students. But those are some of the challenges where I say we’re have that consistent with the curriculum. If you’re teaching a class, what would be, and then how it fits into the rest of the curriculum. And most faculty has been pretty resistant to saying, we’ll just figure out how to incorporate AI into an existing doctrinal class, especially in the first year. There’s also these questions about whether one L should use AI as part of legal research and writing. So there’s a number of things out there of them are, you might not think about ’em, but ultimately none of ’em are out of that surprising. But there’s things that have to be worked through.

Tom Mighell (19:59):
Alright, so last question on this. So we’ve talked a little bit about where your students will learn. What have you learned from teaching the class? What are the biggest lessons learned? And then maybe looking towards the future based on what you’ve learned, what does a perfect class look like for you?

Dennis Kennedy (20:18):
I think that my last semester, well, I was so impressed with what my students did was I sort of learned this sense of optimism that if you get students and you get the tools in their hands, they can really kind of think through this stuff. And I know that my approach plays a part in this, but I just really like what they were able to do and the insights that they had and will say there’s a level of sophistication, you see some issues because they haven’t practiced. So there are some things that they don’t have quite right, but I’m really impressed with what they can do. I have students who graduated last spring who are already part of the committee that’s planning the AI strategy for their firms. So I think that it’s a really interesting place where people can accelerate their careers really quickly.

(21:22):
So I’ve learned that. And the other thing I’ve learned is that I would say AI in law and elsewhere, but AI brings us really quickly to the most fundamental questions that you can have of what is trust, how do you trust those sorts of things. And it also reflects on the legal system we have what it means to be a human, all those sorts of things. It becomes really fascinating and it’s in a world where there’s no answers and you do feel like we’re in a time of really significant change. It reminds me in some ways of the beginning of the internet and its impact, but there’s unknowns, lots of unknowns and it allows you to be creative as a lawyer in how you think. So it’s a really, really fun time and a really fun topic to be working in. So the perfect class I would say is I would like to see a really significant level of comfort.

(22:32):
I had this discussion with a law pressure in London over the summer, and we were talking about if you gave your reading materials and the students, they read them of course, but they also use the AI to prep for the class, then could you accelerate the level of discussions and go deeper into topics because people got up to speed. So I think that in the perfect class I would see even more hands-on with the AI and more discussions and more of the simulation approach. And that’s sort of what I’m leaning to. There’s part of me who would like to educate tons of people and have bigger classes, but I think the students have all told me, and my sense is that having about 20 people is a pretty good size. I could see doing something where you want even smaller and let people go very deep into different topics. But that’s what I think the perfect class would be like. But just getting these committed students and teaching them to run with this and see what they can come off with, I think we’d be really fun.

Tom Mighell (23:50):
Well, and given how many current lawyers know so little about it and are not advancing the ball on artificial intelligence, I think that graduating new generations of people who understand responsible use and can go out and be the governors of artificial intelligence in the future, I think is super important. So glad that you and hopefully others are taking similar approaches and are producing people all over the place on this.

Dennis Kennedy (24:20):
Yeah, I think you’re, what you said about the governing, this is really important. I think I tell the students that this is an area where lawyers need to be part of the conversation and the legal profession seems to be stepping back. And this is also happening at a time when, especially business clients, but I think other traditional clients of law firms are looking for ways to potentially route around lawyers in the slowness of the court system and other things like that. So it’s a fascinating time and I think the legal profession needs to be looking at in a way that says, can we, as one of my friends said, I’m retiring in eight years, he said this, not me, I’m retiring in eight years. I think I’m going to sit this one out when I ask him about if he was using ai. And that gets horrified looks for my students by the way. But I think that lawyers need to be part of the conversation because otherwise I think that AI gives people yet another way to eliminate lawyers from the discussion and potentially the whole equation.

Tom Mighell (25:32):
Yep, yep, yep. Alright, we’ve got more to talk about. We have our next segment, but before we move on to that, we need to take another quick break for a message from our sponsors. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy (25:47):
And I’m Dennis Kennedy. We wanted to remind you to share this podcast with a friend or two that helps us out in this segment. We turn again to a generative AI tool to act as a stand in for you, our audience and to create a question for us to answer. So I use Chat GPT this time to give us a question appropriate for this episode. And here’s the question, Tom, what strategies can law schools use to give law students hands-on access to cutting edge AI tools, especially for schools with limited resources? Tom, you’re first and I’m really interested in your perspective on this one.

Tom Mighell (26:25):
Well, first I just want to say how shocked, shocked I am that the tool was able to understand that you’re working with a group of people who may not have funds or resources to have cutting edge AI tools. So I’ll say my challenge, and I find interesting that you’re interested in my perspective on this, given that I’m years away and decades away from law school and frankly, we didn’t have the level of focus on technology back then that we do now, but here are my ideas. And so if the notion of ideas is that you throw anything up against the wall to see what will stick, then there are pros and cons I think to all of these approaches. But these are the things that came immediately to mind when I started thinking about it. I think the first one, and the most obvious one is that there are a lot of AI tools out there that offer either free trials or a free, albeit lesser option to use.

(27:24):
Those are always options. Having that out there, that doesn’t necessarily pass the test of you saying that all practicing lawyers should be using the $20 account for any one of the AI tools that we talked about. So let’s think about next steps. So next step may be partnerships. Let’s partner with legal tech companies that offer an AI product. Will they be willing to offer that product in exchange for some type of benefit or some type of partnership that you have? But OpenAI offers a program called Chat g pt edu. Now that’s I think primarily focused on universities, but I don’t know necessarily wouldn’t offer it to law schools or that a law school couldn’t take advantage of what had been offered to a university. I am not as familiar with open source AI tools, but there are several of those. GPT has got a public API that’s going to allow anybody to create custom AI tools.

(28:24):
So you’re able to do that for free. I guess the question is, does the law school have a relationship with your universities computer sciences department or engineering department? Can you enter into a partnership at that level too? And then I guess the last option, the last thing that I thought about is most law schools have clinics. Most law schools are working with legal aid agencies, which have begun to deploy their own AI tools. So partner with them for externships or for clinic opportunities where you might be using these tools and build the tools into the clinic or the externship or whatever it is as a way of getting to use it. You may not get to use broader, more powerful tools like Chat GPT or Claude or any of these others, but you’re still getting access to what artificial intelligence is doing. Those are my, off the top of my head type of things. I’m sure that there are pros and cons to each one of those approaches, but Dennis, you’ve been probably thinking about this longer than I have. What are you thinking about here?

Dennis Kennedy (29:32):
Yeah, so although you don’t believe that AI came up with this, I actually had to come up with three questions for us and I picked this one. So I have thought about this. So there is this funding notion, right? So what if you were a law firm or somebody and you wanted to build a pipeline to lawsuits who are using AI and get those skills, could you kind of cover the cost of the $20, let’s call it the $20 a month cost? I think this is way more complicated when it comes to licensing than the concept is. So you say, could I fund something? Could I do something that I could do that? Then you have the relationships with the vendors. So clear brief does some cool things here. And then the trick here is that the AI being built into Lexi and Westlaw, and I love the Westlaw Practical Law.

(30:29):
I still struggle with the Westlaw. That’s the story for another day. You say, if I’m bringing an AI tool into a law school, I sort of have to get over the hurdle that the Lexus and Westlaw are already there, but there is a possibility that the vendors could come in and then I think there is, you could do something where what Cat Moon is doing at Vanderbilt are things I’m looking into where you’d say we have a center that’s focused on AI, or the library is doing something and there could be funding or the center then provides those things. But there also has to be a commitment from the top to doing that because if you don’t have the policies in place or you’re sending a confusing message to students, I don’t know, this can work. So it’s time for parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can the second this podcast sends to take it away.

Tom Mighell (31:30):
So my tip is not technology related, more of a life lesson. And I guess if I’m being honest, it is a first world problem life lesson for those of you who have TSA pre-check to be able to get through security of the airport faster. You may or may not have received your pre-check through global Entry. Now, global entry, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is a service where that helps making it getting back into the country. If you travel abroad a lot easier, you don’t have to go through customs or it’s a much more simplified process. And for those who have global entry memberships or who have that certification, it also comes with TSA precheck, those certifications. The global entry is a five year program that expires on your birthday. Global Entry will not tell you when your program is set to expire, when your membership is set to expire.

(32:27):
And you may find yourself at the airport thinking that you had pre-check when you do not have pre-check. So I’ve learned the hard way to keep an eye on that global entry membership and sure you’re renewing it. The good news is, is that when you renew it, it’s literally within a day or day and a half that you can be renewed. You don’t have to jump through any hoops, you just need to pay your renewal fee and ask for it to be renewed and it’s easy. But I will say that after having been a pre-check user for many, many years, it was an interesting experience traveling with people who don’t travel very often. And so I would say that if you want to still be able to get through the airport fast, make sure you’re paying attention to that. It was a lesson that I learned this past week.

Dennis Kennedy (33:12):
So Tom, would we have gotten a chance to see you saying to them, don’t you know who I am?

Tom Mighell (33:18):
No, I’m not that kind of, no.

Dennis Kennedy (33:22):
Okay. So as more and more of the internet moves beyond paywalls, I’ve jumped onto to this trend or train. And so I have a new email newsletter on substack, it’s called Personal Strategy Compass. It’s about the things I’m doing about personal strategy and planning, focusing on my notion of personal quarterly offsite, which we’ve talked about from time to time on this podcast. So that’s available on substack personal strategy compass, sorry, paid subscription only on that one. And then I have a tech tip, Tom and a hardware tip for a change. And so you had talked in the past about having a wireless keyboard and then having a problem with the wifi and then not being able to use your computer, sorry, with the Bluetooth, sorry. And so I use these Apple mini keyboards, the small keyboards, magic keyboards I guess they’re called. And I like them, but they’re smallish.

(34:29):
And for me, for some reason it seems like the letters were off a little bit quickly and I’m not sure why that is or that’s only my experience. So I decided I wanted to try a larger one and get back lit and just see what happens. So I got this one called a, I forget how we decided to pronounce this time. I think it’s Satechi. It’s called the Slim W three Wired backlit keyboard with a numeric keypad. And so far, so good. I like the bigger keypad, a little easier for me to work with and I like the fact that it’s wired and I don’t have to worry about the battery running out or anything like that. So Tom, you were right. There are benefits of going back to the Wired approach.

Tom Mighell (35:20):
Yep. I recently got a new computer and almost lost it again that time because I had gotten rid of my wired mouse and had to go track it down. I definitely needed something to be able to get in before I could set up the Bluetooth. Alright, so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal to Networks page for our show. You can find all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts on the Legal Talk Network website if you’d like to subscribe to the show. Again, you can do that at the Legal Talk Network site or in your favorite podcast app. If you want to get in touch with us, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn or remember, we’d love to get your voicemail. That number is 720-441-6820. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy (36:10):
And I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. If you like what you heard today, please rate us an Apple podcast. And as always a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast as we come up time soon to 19 years of doing this podcast. And we will see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Announcer (36:37):
Thanks for listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together from ABA Books or Amazon. And join us every other week for another a edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.