Likely the first of many.
The post Law School Now Requires Students To Get Artificial Intelligence Certification appeared first on Above the Law.
Generative AI continues to dominate the legal tech hype cycle. Despite high-profile embarrassments for lawyers trying to use the algorithmic hallucination machine to disastrous end, trusted industry providers remain confident that proper safeguards and techniques can build a time-saving AI assistant for lawyers.
And idiots are saying the same thing.
But… let’s not go crazy. The biggest players in AI are already admitting that it takes exponential resources to make linear improvements and when they’re losing billions each year while promising it’s going to all be worth it if they could just get several more billion to suck up several more gigawatts of power, it might be worth considering that what we have now is pretty much as good as AI is going to get.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Artificial intelligence tools will absolutely unlock substantial benefits for attorneys and jump start projects as lawyers build out sophisticated methods of mining the firm’s accumulated knowledge and models to create workable first drafts. It could deliver efficiencies that finally take down the billable hour. But — barring a singularity-level jump in something like quantum computing — it’s not replacing lawyers.
Case Western Reserve University School of Law understands both the promise and limitations of generative AI and has launched a new requirement for 1Ls to achieve certification in AI.
Case Western Reserve University School of Law will become the first in the nation to require all first-year law students to earn a certification in legal artificial intelligence (AI). Launching in February of this year, the “Introduction to AI and the Law” program—developed in partnership with Wickard.ai—will immerse students in the fundamentals of AI and its impact on the legal world.
It doesn’t require getting swallowing the AI hype to realize that this is a technology that young attorneys will be expected to understand. For lawyers of another generation, this is no different than law schools requiring 1Ls to learn how to use Lexis and Westlaw 25 years ago. A graduating lawyer in the latter half of the 2020s will need to know what the major legal AI products are, how they work, and how NOT to use them. That last part might be the most important and the CWRU Law course will discuss the evolving landscape of AI regulations and the ethical considerations lawyers have to take into account.
Expect this course to become a model for more law schools in the coming years. Just like those law students in the early 2000s stopped learning how to use books for Shepardizing and mastered boolean search terms, newly minted lawyers are going to be expected to know how the major AI tools work within the firm.
Earlier: Generative AI… What If This Is As Good As It Gets?
Elon Musk Feeds AI ‘All Court Cases,’ Promises It Will Replace Judges Because He’s An Idiot
