Every Law Firm Should Build Their Own AI, Yale Professor Says

Sept. 25, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

Law firms “have gold sitting on their hard drives,” according to Yale Law School professor Scott Shapiro.

Shapiro has enthusiastically embraced the use of generative AI in his classroom. He says firms should draw on the mountains of proprietary information at their fingertips to build their own tools.

“If only they would train the large language models correctly, they, I believe, would get absolutely stupendous results,” he said.

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Shapiro spoke to Bloomberg Law editor Jessie Kokrda Kamens for our podcast, On The Merits, about why he thinks every firm should make its own AI and he explains how he and his students actually did this themselves using years of documents from his Yale legal clinic.

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To contact the reporter on this story: David Schultz in Washington at dschultz@bloomberglaw.com

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