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Start Date
3-8-2023 4:00 PM
Description
The legal research course is over a century old. As a law school subject, it predates many doctrinal courses, as well as the advent of clinical legal education. It is several decades older than its sister subject, legal writing. In spite of its age and obvious importance, the place of the legal research course in the law school curriculum remains contested. While some law faculties recognize the value of legal research instruction and require a standalone legal research course in the first year, the vast majority combine it with legal writing (often over the objections of legal writing instructors and law librarians alike) and/or periodically offer it as an upper-level elective under the misleading title “advanced legal research” (misleading because it is typically the law student’s introduction to the formal study of legal research).
In recent months, amidst the hype surrounding LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT and their legal counterparts, such as CoCounsel and Harvey, there has been much speculation about a future in which so-called “AI-powered” law practice technologies ‘do your legal research and writing for you.’ But what if these new technologies actually make legal research more, not less, important. While AI products will soon generate passable legal documents, the Rules of Professional Conduct will continue to require that a human attorney take responsibility for the resulting documents, and these human attorneys will still need to do legal research to (re)familiarize themselves with the legal issues contained in these documents in order to competently file, execute, or advocate for the adoption of the arguments contained in them, as well as to break with the AI system when it fails to properly serve their clients. If this is the case, the legal research course, which already encompasses legal information literacy, technology evaluation, and prompt construction, will inevitably become a core part of the law school curriculum.
Can the advent of LLM-based tools be used to reimagine the legal research course and its place in the law school curriculum? This panel of legal research instructors and law librarians will explore this distinct possibility, mapping a new legal research curriculum in which we teach LLM-based tools rather than fear them, and the critical evaluation of legal information, including legal technologies, is front and center. Panelists will discuss curricular changes that incorporate instruction in the informed use of LLM-based tools, envisioning them as a high-tech template or latter-day form that invigorates legal research, in order to better prepare law students to work with these tools throughout their careers.
Included in
An Immodest Proposal: AI, LLMs, and the Case for a Standalone Legal Research Requirement
The legal research course is over a century old. As a law school subject, it predates many doctrinal courses, as well as the advent of clinical legal education. It is several decades older than its sister subject, legal writing. In spite of its age and obvious importance, the place of the legal research course in the law school curriculum remains contested. While some law faculties recognize the value of legal research instruction and require a standalone legal research course in the first year, the vast majority combine it with legal writing (often over the objections of legal writing instructors and law librarians alike) and/or periodically offer it as an upper-level elective under the misleading title “advanced legal research” (misleading because it is typically the law student’s introduction to the formal study of legal research).
In recent months, amidst the hype surrounding LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT and their legal counterparts, such as CoCounsel and Harvey, there has been much speculation about a future in which so-called “AI-powered” law practice technologies ‘do your legal research and writing for you.’ But what if these new technologies actually make legal research more, not less, important. While AI products will soon generate passable legal documents, the Rules of Professional Conduct will continue to require that a human attorney take responsibility for the resulting documents, and these human attorneys will still need to do legal research to (re)familiarize themselves with the legal issues contained in these documents in order to competently file, execute, or advocate for the adoption of the arguments contained in them, as well as to break with the AI system when it fails to properly serve their clients. If this is the case, the legal research course, which already encompasses legal information literacy, technology evaluation, and prompt construction, will inevitably become a core part of the law school curriculum.
Can the advent of LLM-based tools be used to reimagine the legal research course and its place in the law school curriculum? This panel of legal research instructors and law librarians will explore this distinct possibility, mapping a new legal research curriculum in which we teach LLM-based tools rather than fear them, and the critical evaluation of legal information, including legal technologies, is front and center. Panelists will discuss curricular changes that incorporate instruction in the informed use of LLM-based tools, envisioning them as a high-tech template or latter-day form that invigorates legal research, in order to better prepare law students to work with these tools throughout their careers.
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Presentation slides available for download by clicking the link above.