AI Legal Education Pushes Skills, Clinics, and Healthy Skepticism

The legal world is suddenly full of confident predictions. Artificial intelligence will replace junior lawyers. Briefs will write themselves. Firms will slash hiring. The J.D. will become optional or even irrelevant.

AI adoption has serious risks, including lack of transparency, the importance of disclosure, and disparate economic impact. But the truth, and the landscape of AI, are messier—and more consequential. Legal education must evolve in real time to equip law students for an AI-driven future.

The good news: Law schools are adapting AI in the classroom, and law students can be confident that they are receiving an education that will prepare them to thrive in their profession.

Rapid Evolution

Here’s what AI is changing: not just the tools lawyers use, but the expectations that clients, courts, and employers will have about speed, cost, accuracy, and accountability. More shifts are certain, and the impacts on work, compensation, and career paths are tough to predict.

Law schools are often caricatured as slow-moving institutions. But on AI, many have become rapid responders. New legal technology platforms can draft, summarize, search, and translate at a scale that changes what “entry-level” work looks like. The landscape is moving under everyone’s feet: the technology, the ethics rules, employer workflows, and even what counts as competent lawyering.

The job of a modern law school is to teach students how to practice in that uncertainty with judgment, not just how to click the right buttons. So, what does adaptation look like in practice? It looks less like a single “AI class” and more like a set of fast, pragmatic changes across the curricular spectrum—doctrine, skills, simulations, clinics—paired with a healthy skepticism about hype.

AI Teaching Approaches

First, law schools are integrating AI where lawyers actually encounter it. That includes modules in legal research and writing on how generative tools can help (and how they can hallucinate); discussions in professional responsibility about confidentiality, competence, supervision, and the duty to verify. In coursework, professors are connecting AI to privacy, cybersecurity, consumer protection, intellectual property, employment, and emerging regulation.

For example, several schools, including Drake University Law School and Boston University School of Law, have certificate programs in AI. Suffolk University Law School and the Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law require courses for first-year students to ensure AI literacy.

Other schools such as the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School have intensive “bootcamps,” some with customizable tracks for different practice settings. The University of San Francisco School of Law takes the approach of integrating AI education across the curriculum. Others are experimenting with electives that treat AI as both subject matter and method—how to audit outputs, design prompts, document workflows, and spot bias.

Second, experiential learning is shifting, too. Clinics and externships are confronting the practical questions students will face on day one:

• When is it appropriate to use an AI tool on client materials?
• What has to be disclosed—and to whom?
• How do you keep a human “in the loop” without turning review into a rubber stamp?

At the same time, partnerships with courts, legal aid organizations, and technologists are helping schools test new service models—such as guided self-help, document assembly, and triage tools—while keeping the focus on accuracy, fairness, and accountability.

Third, schools are adjusting the “rules of the classroom.” Many are issuing guidance on when AI tools may be used for assignments, how to cite or describe AI assistance, and what constitutes plagiarism or unauthorized collaboration in an AI era. Faculty are also redesigning formative assessments—more in-class writing, more oral argument, more drafting with process memos—so students can demonstrate not just a polished product, but the reasoning that produced it.

None of this is happening because law schools think the profession is doomed. It’s happening because they know the profession is changing—and because they want graduates to be the lawyers who can lead that change.

Yes, some routine tasks will be automated. But the deeper shift is that lawyers will be expected to deliver judgment, not just output: to ask the right questions, challenge unreliable answers, counsel clients through risk, and take responsibility for decisions that affect real people.

We know that this technology will lead to new careers and expanded roles, some of which we have yet to consider. Some aspects of legal work will decrease or sunset, while new opportunities, industries, and technologies will surface to move the practice of law forward.

There’s also a reason for long-term optimism. In a country where most civil legal needs still go unmet, better, more innovative tools can help widen the funnel—screening issues, preparing forms, translating information, and reducing administrative drag.

But access to justice doesn’t come from software alone. It comes from professionals trained to spot what the tool misses: power imbalances, unstable facts, conflicting duties, and the human consequences of a “reasonable” recommendation. If AI expands what’s possible, legal education is where we teach the standards—ethical, procedural, and institutional—that make that expansion reliable and trustworthy.

AI will keep improving, and the profession will keep renegotiating what work belongs to machines, what work belongs to humans, and what work requires both. That’s exactly why the value of a legal education endures. A J.D. isn’t a bet against technology; it’s training in analysis, advocacy, and responsibility in systems where the stakes are high and the answers are contested.

Law schools should be judged not by whether they can predict the future, but by whether they are preparing graduates to harness and shape it.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Danielle M. Conway is dean and Donald J. Farage professor of law at Penn State Dickinson Law.

Richard E. Moberly is dean and Richard C. & Catherine S. Schmoker professor of law at University of Nebraska College of Law.

Kellye Testy is executive director and CEO of the Association of American Law Schools.

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