How to Use AI as a Law Student
Thoughts on integrating cutting edge tools into your legal education.
I’m a law student. I’m a third-year student (for some reason, we say “3L”), which means a couple things. It means that I began law school as artificial intelligence tools began to explode in popularity. It means that — as graduation looms in the next few months — I’m starting to reflect on my legal education. And, it means that I’m no longer flailing under the crushing course load that is familiar to first-year students. Students who are still swimming through the rapids of their early legal education may not have the time to pause and think about how AI tools can be used to improve their legal education. Let me try to do some of that for you. Here are the ways that AI has been helpful in my legal education.
But first, the disclaimer. AI tools pose at least two serious dangers for law students that are worth mentioning.
Don’t Break the Rules: Any use of AI that violates your school/course/professor’s policies (and note that each of these may be quite different) about academic honesty is liable to put you in front of a disciplinary committee. Don’t risk it. Even putting aside moral concerns about gaining an unfair advantage relative to your peers, the benefits of AI tools don’t outweigh the risks of jeopardizing your career. Google the rules at your school. Consult your course syllabus. Ask your professor. Almost everyone recognizes that these tools are an inevitable part of legal practice, so there will almost certainly be some room for you to integrate them into your learning experience.
Don’t Waste Your Money: You’re spending a lot of money and time on your legal education. Sometimes, the boring stuff that law school asks us to do is foundational and important. Sometimes, it isn’t. I would not recommend using AI to side-step the (often frustrating) experience of struggling through material, especially in your first year, when you know that the struggle will pay dividends in the long term.
Okay, you probably skipped to this part. I’m off the high horse. Let’s talk tips.
If you haven’t already found your favorite chat bot, consider the classic options as of today: Claude and/or ChatGPT. Both offer limited use for free users and almost-unlimited use for paid users. I pay $24/mo for Claude Pro.
You can also check out some of the less popular options — Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, or — if you’re out of your mind — Grok from X/Twitter.
There’s also a great AI tool that I consider to be a separate use case from the above: Perplexity. I use this as an enhanced version of Google search mixed with Wikipedia. I don’t find it to be useful in conversation, where other LLMs excel. Perplexity gives fast, comprehensive and — most importantly — cited responses to general queries. I ask a question, skim the response, and then navigate to the sources that it cites.
Okay. How can you leverage these tools to improve your legal education? Let’s take it in three categories: (1) coursework, (2) research and writing, and (3) preparing for exams.
Coursework
For most courses, you’re mostly doing two things: reading and taking notes. AI can help you with both.
Summarize Your Readings. Popular LLMs, like ChatGPT and Claude, are good summarizers. One of the easiest ways to start integrating AI into your coursework is to use AI to provide summaries, ideally generated before or after you do the reading. I can’t endorse AI-generated summaries as a sufficient substitute for genuine reading (or at least high-quality skimming)— you’ll end up flubbing the cold call or missing the structure of the argument. The best way to start integrating AI into your readings is do it the old-fashioned way, then spend a couple minutes generating summaries that you can compare with your own notes.
Consider starting a chat in your favorite chat bot with customized instructions about how you want to receive summaries. Here’s a prompt I’ve used to create summaries of scholarly articles:
You are Mr. Summary. You are an expert in legal writing. When I provide you with a document, respond to me with a summary in this format:
Title: [title of the document]
Author: [author and their qualification]
Topline: [one sentence summary of the most salient and important idea]
Key Points: [bullet point of the key points with page references]
Explore More: [pose questions to me that will deepen my understanding of the document]
If you’re summarizing cases, you might want to create a similar prompt with equivalent fields like: Facts / Procedural History / Legal Question / Holding / Reasoning / Concurring and Dissenting Opinions. Ask the chat bot to present that information to you in particular ways (bullet points? short sentences? narrative?), and see which style you prefer.
You may find this especially useful for complicated facts sections filled with dense statutory citations, especially in courses like Administrative Law. Ask your chat bot to cut through the noise and give you a succinct factual summary.
Turn Your Reading into a Podcast. I use Speechify to listen to some of my readings. You can upload text (including PDFs), pick a voice, and then listen to your readings in a kinda-natural-sounding way. You can also set the speed, which is very useful, and integrate your Canvas account to automatically access course materials.
This isn’t a cheap suggestion: it’s $12/mo for an annual subscription or $30/mo, if you go month-by-month. It can also run into issues with footnotes: it will sometimes read them aloud and will sometimes skip over them, jumping to the main text on the next page. This hasn’t been a big issue: you can just click on the start of the next page to jump to that text.
This also requires your readings to be digital. You can take pictures of a casebook and make them into a PDF, but that’s cumbersome and annoying. This is best when you have courses with lots of online materials or a digital casebook.
Synthesize Your Readings. Let’s get more creative. Your professor assigned you a slew of readings. Use AI to put them in conversation with each other. Upload two or more cases, and ask the LLM to compare them. How does the court’s approach to contract formation differ in these two cases? Is the Supreme Court actually applying the same test in these two cases? AI will give you both good and bad answers to more complicated, synthesis-style questions. Great! The process of disagreeing with the AI’s output is — in my opinion — the best possible way to use AI when thinking about readings. You might start putting each week’s reading into a chat and asking the LLM to extract three themes or to identify patterns.
In my view, this is the next level and it remains the place that I’m working towards: leveraging AI as a study aid that makes the complicated, important, fun parts of learning into a more engaging experience.
Research and Writing
Consider these ideas for seminar courses with papers, independent research projects, and classes focused on research skills. Note that as this blog post continues, we are increasingly moving into areas that could potentially run afoul of academic policies, depending on your school and professor. Check policies, ask professors, and err on the side of caution.
Another note, which you’ve probably heard before: chat bots hallucinate. They do it a little bit when you ask them about people and notable events. They do it a lot when you ask them specific questions about the law. It’s almost as if they’re too eager to please. If you ask for a scholarly article or case that stands for a certain proposition, it’ll probably identify a source that says exactly what you’re looking for… and it will be completely wrong. As a general rule, avoid publicly available models for any sort of genuine research and stick to the law-specific tools. More on this below.
Bounce Ideas. Instead of imagining AI as a magical expert on all things, imagine a chat bot as an over-eager classmate who read most important cases… but might not have the perfect grasp on what they mean. Ask them the simpler questions that you’re worried about asking your professors (“What are the elements of negligence again?” “What’s the name of that major SCOTUS case about campaign finance from 2010?”). Ask them to challenge your thesis (“I‘m a law student writing a research paper arguing that random bag checks on the NYC subway violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. What are the three strongest arguments against that thesis?”). Ask them to review what early research documents with scattered ideas (“Review the attached document. You are a legal writing professor. Ask me questions to help clarify my thoughts and to develop a thesis.”).
Do not expect those responses to contain high-quality legal analysis. Use those conversations as entry points that generate more ideas. Trust your intuition, too. It’ll be better than the AI every time.
Gather Initial Research. My starting point for legal research — in both new and familiar areas of the law — is quickly becoming the AI tools provided by our favorite research platforms: WestLaw and Lexis. These tools are unlike ChatGPT, and they can be a useful tool in actual research.
Thomson Reuter (aka WestLaw) has a decent AI tool geared towards all sorts of legal tasks: CoCounsel. It has non-research capabilities — drafting, reviewing contracts, summarizing —that are less suited for law students. Its “Research” capability, though, has the potential to be a huge boost for law students. I’m finding that the queries are best asked in the form of short questions with highly specific information (akin to a Question Presented in an appellate brief). This isn’t an chat bot that you want to go back and forth with — you want a single incisive prompt that it’ll chew on for a few minutes, and then spit out highly useful starting points. Once you ask a question, you’ll be prompted to choose between “AI-Assisted Research” and “Ask Practical Law AI.” This is just a way to run either (1) WestLaw Precision or (2) Practical Law. If those are unfamiliar categories to you, it means that you are just using WestLaw Precision. That’s the primary research tool for law students. Practical Law is geared towards practicing attorneys, but you might query Practical Law with CoCounsel to get a survey of a new area of law.
Lexis has its own tool: the Lexis AI Assistant. It does the same thing. I don’t like it quite as much because I haven’t found the results to be as consistently useful. It’s a little bit faster and the interface is a little more slick, though. Try both. See which you like.
These are great places to start your work. The succinct outputs will generate more questions, and the sources linked in the answers may form the basis of your next research steps. Think of these tools as a way to jump-start research.
Summarize Your Own Drafts. You’re deep in a draft and the words are starting to swim. Upload your latest document into a large language model and ask it to summarize your argument. Consider having it output bullet points with a one sentence summary of each of your paragraphs. You can see where you’re straying from the point and where you’re weaving together a coherent argument.
And, maybe, sometimes, if you think it’s a good idea, edit your drafts. Eventually, we’ll all use AI tools to provide detailed edits on our work. The sophistication of the technology isn’t there yet, in my view, and this function may be more trouble than it’s worth. Asking an LLM to “provide feedback” or to “propose edits” on your draft is not always useful. This is also an area where you’re especially likely to be in violation of academic policies, so tread with extreme caution. I have friends who like using AI as an ultra-advanced thesaurus, which proposes alternative phrasing/words for their drafts. I haven’t experimented with that.
Preparing for Exams
Be extra-careful here, and — obviously — never use AI to just write an exam answer. Your own work will be higher-quality. Seriously. But, don’t be afraid to find out if you can use AI to enhance your studying process. Consider that, depending on your school and course, some of these suggestions are probably not allowed. I’m listing them in roughly descending order of how confident I am that they would be allowed/encouraged by your professor.
Make the Ultimate CTRL+F. Upload a consolidated document with your notes, outline, etc. into a single chat with the LLM. Describe what the document is, and tell it that you’ll be asking it to extract information with page citations. Then, when you’re trying to recall specific information or trying to remember every time that a topic appeared throughout the class, you can pull up that same chat and use it to search through your notes. The more sophisticated the question, the more you’ll want to verify the output.
Create Exam Questions. Your professor will probably provide you with a few of the exams that they’ve administered in the past. Your school might have an even deeper backlog of their exams. With those in hand, you can start creating even more exam questions in the style of your professor with AI. The questions won’t be as good, but they will create more opportunities for you to practice answering questions in the style of that course.
Find Patterns. Once you have previous exams uploaded, ask it to identify patterns in the prompts. Sure, your Constitutional Law exam asks about the equal protection clause every year. Does each exam ask about the state action doctrine? Does your professor have an undying love for the dormant commerce clause? This patterns may naturally jump out as you manually work through the practice exams, but consider using AI to identify more subtle patterns.
Compare Your Practice Exam to Model Answers. Many professors will provide you with sample answers to their previous exams. In my view, the most useful process in studying for an exam is writing out a full response to an exam and methodically comparing it to a good answer. Don’t deprive yourself of that (arduous) process. But, supplement it with AI. Use a chat bot to identify formatting, structure of arguments, areas of focus, repeated citations to cases, etc. that appealed to your professor in previous years.
There’s plenty more to say about how AI can be useful in students’ professional lives (finding jobs; editing resumes and cover letters; preparing for interviews) and personal lives (schedule management; inbox management; finding things to do near school). If you find this blog useful, leave a comment/email/text/whatever to let me know and I can share more. If you have other ideas, disagree vehemently with me, and want to think about how law schools can be encouraging responsible use, reach out.
