Generative AI in Legal Clinics: Training Tomorrow's Lawyers with Emerging Technology

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Session Type: Lightning Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Harborside Ballroom E

Floor: Fourth Floor

Generative AI (GAI) is fast becoming a significant tool for legal service providers. While the use of GAI in practice is increasing by the month, law schools have been cautious about adding this technology into our curriculum. Unlike other skills we teach, most clinicians do not have independent experience with using GAI for legal work, and are not yet comfortable relying on in the classroom. Caution is understandable; GAI raises ethical concerns, as well as questions around impacts of students learning of other baseline skills. And the technology is changing and evolving at a seemingly dizzying pace. Yet, as clinicians we want to prepare our students for the tools, dilemmas, and thinking they will need for practice; and as legal service providers quickly ramp up their use of GAI, this is a tool we need to introduce to our students. The presenters are two self-defined non-experts in this area who have been experimenting with incorporating GAI into our curriculums. We will offer the framing we provide around the ethical issues inherent with using (and possibly not using) GAI and provide several ways in which we have used GAI in classes and in our client representation. Our goal is that participants leave with: •materials that can be used for framing the use of AI, including ethical issues it raises; •sample language we have used in client retainers/engagement letters; and •lesson plans or exercises where we have used AI with students, in areas of interviewing, contract drafting, editing written work, and brainstorming options/solutions for clients.