AI's Impact on Legal Education: Preparing Future Lawyers for a Tech-Driven World

 

 

Summary

In this episode of 2030 Vision, Jen Leonard and Bridget McCormack explore the profound impact of AI on legal education. They break down essential AI-related terms including AI Washing & Context Window, share personal "AI Aha!" moments, and discuss how generative AI is reshaping law schools and the legal profession. They delve into the challenges law schools face in integrating technology, the role of accreditation in ranking law schools, and how future lawyers can prepare for a rapidly evolving legal landscape. Tune in for insights into the technological skills future lawyers need and how law schools can address the AI-driven changes in legal practice.

Key Takeaways

  • AI washing refers to overstating AI capabilities in products.
  • Context window is the amount of information a model can process.
  • AI AHA moments highlight exciting insights in AI development.
  • Insta-headshots can produce professional photos quickly and affordably using AI.
  • Google’s Notebook LM can create realistic podcasts from uploaded documents.
  • Law schools are facing an innovator's dilemma with AI integration.
  • Generative AI presents new opportunities for legal education.
  • Law schools need to rethink their curriculum to include AI.
  • Prospective students should inquire about technology integration in law schools.
  • Future lawyers need skills for adapting to a changing profession.

Transcript

Jen Leonard: Hi everybody, and welcome to this episode of 2030 Vision: AI and the Future of Law. I am one of your co-hosts, Jen Leonard, founder of Creative Lawyers, and I am thrilled as always to be joined by Bridget McCormick, President and CEO of the American Arbitration Association.

Today, Bridget and I are going to talk about the implications of AI on legal education, an area where we've both spent some time and focus, and Bridget continues to focus in some of her activities on this topic. And before we jump into legal education, we will start as always with our two headline activities, which are sharing a couple of definitions with everybody about AI that you might hear as you're learning more about it and what they mean. And then our Gen AI Moments of the Week, which we are actually going to rebrand this week in response to a listener comment. So I'm going to turn it over to Bridget to sort of kick us off on definitions, and we'll go from there.

Bridget McCormack: Excellent. It's great to see you. It was wonderful to see you in person last week at Whipple. That was really fun. And it was really fun to talk to Casey about the way AI is changing the profession. We should figure out how to collaborate with her more often. I liked her a lot.

Jen Leonard: Totally. That was so fun, and you did such a great job introducing the amazing Venus Williams to talk about resilience and growth mindset and all of those things. That must have been fun.

Bridget McCormack: It was really fun. She's amazing. I was really rapt by her discussion. It was great. So, kicking off the legal education episode, I'm excited to talk about this topic. You and I both, as you said, have spent a lot of time in legal education. In fact, I feel like I spent one long chapter of my career—you know, a decade and a half—as a full-time faculty member at Michigan. And then you and I have taught together at Penn, and you spent, I don't know, ten years? Maybe longer. So we both care a lot about legal education and helping law students succeed. And so this is a topic I think is close to both of our hearts.

Definitions: AI Washing & Context Windows

But as always, let's start with our regular segments—first, definitions. And the first one I want to ask you about, Jen, is AI washing, which is a term I'm hearing more and more. What does that refer to?

Jen Leonard: Yeah, I'm also hearing it more and more. And I'm also going to give credit to Stephanie Wilkins, the fabulous legal tech reporter who recently—just yesterday—announced that she's moving on to her next chapter from American Legal Media, but has done a fabulous job covering technology, especially over the last couple of years. She has a great online AI glossary (if you find her on LinkedIn, you can link to it). She includes “AI washing,” which is related somewhat to “greenwashing,” which we might have heard of in other contexts. That was the idea that companies overstate the environmental sustainability of their products in an effort to sell more products to consumers who are unaware of the real environmental harms they might be causing. So “AI washing” is similar, but it's just in the AI context. It's companies overstating or over-exaggerating the capabilities or use of artificial intelligence in their products.

I think this is particularly important for lawyers because there's this sort of resurgence and repackaging of tools that already existed on the market that might actually be historical AI tools, but not generative AI tools, and are now sort of flooding the inboxes of lawyers with claims that they use generative AI to do all sorts of things. And I've heard a lot of disappointed consumers in the legal industry who were unaware of the limitations of some of the products that are being pitched to them. So that is what AI washing is. I've seen that there are some FTC efforts to sort of curb AI washing — the DoNotPay "robot lawyer" is one of the targets of some of that activity. So I think we'll continue to hear more about this as consumer protection agencies and groups get involved. So that is AI washing. What about “context window,” Bridget? We hear about this every time a new model comes out. What is a “context window”?

Bridget McCormack: Yeah, that's exactly when you hear about it — when there's a new model, we hear about what the “context window” is. And it's the large language model's working memory, meaning the amount of information it can take in and consider at once when making a particular decision or giving a particular answer. Some of the newer models right now have context windows of up to 100,000 or 200,000 tokens, which I am told translates to being able to comprehend up to, I guess, 300 pages of text in a single prompt. That's an awful lot of text to be able to upload to a model to have it consider in answering your questions. But apparently it's just the beginning, and we're going to see “context windows” grow as the models grow. So that's what people mean by context window.

AI Aha! Moments

So the next segment is our Gen AI Moments of the Week. And we had an interesting comment from a listener about this topic. Do you want to tell us about that, Jen?

Jen Leonard: Yeah, so a shout-out to Megan McMillan, who works in AI development at Cleary. Megan commented on one of our recent episodes that she really loves this part of the segment, but she wasn't sure exactly what we call it. And it made me think maybe we need a little bit of a rebrand to make it an easy hook for people to listen to. So I did what both of us tend to do these days — I asked Claude for some ideas for rebranding our "Gen AI Moment of the Week" segment. 

The first is “AI Aha Moment.” The next was “Robo Revelation.” Claude also suggested “Neural Net Nugget,” which is very clever but also kind of difficult to say. Another one that we kind of liked is “Machine Learning Magic.” And then there were “AI Assist of the Week” and “Deep Learning Delight.”

They are very creative. I think some people don't really understand how creative generative AI can be. But are there any that you like in particular that we could use going forward?

Bridget McCormack: I kind of like them all. And I was taken with "Machine Learning Magic" right away. It feels like magic to me when I use these tools, so it felt genuine. But I think so many of the tools are not necessarily about machine learning, and they certainly are changing so quickly that I think I like "AI Aha" the best, because it feels like a broad enough term to capture all of the different examples you and I seem to talk about in this segment. What do you think about that?

Jen Leonard: Yeah, I really liked "AI Aha!" as well. And there's an exclamation point that Claude included, so when we say it, it will be obvious that it's an "AI Aha!" Very exciting. So thank you to Megan for pointing out the opportunity to rebrand. Going forward, we'll have our AI Aha!’s. So, Bridget, do you want to share what your AI Aha! was since our last recording?

Bridget McCormack: I do, and I love this one. Although I feel like there were so many things this week — so many new tools — that I haven't actually had time to catch up with. So in our next episode, I think I'll have even a lot to choose from, but I have a great one this week. My chief of staff — who's amazing, Kris Roy — used an AI tool to create professional headshots for herself. I'm sure there are many of these tools, so I don't mean to be promoting one in particular, but the one she used was InstaHeadshots.

And here's how it worked. It asked her to upload 10 photos just from her iPhone — selfies. They didn't want them in groups, so she had to find, you know, just photos of herself. As she called them, they were kind of janky photos; none of them were especially great photos of her. And the tool would reject ones that it couldn't work with. So eventually she found 10 selfies and uploaded them all, and then it produced 100 professional headshots.

It looked so incredible. I mean, she's beautiful to begin with — Kris is amazing — but these headshots look fantastic. And I think the cost was like $65, and it did it in about 10 seconds. So in 10 seconds, she had all of these wonderful choices for professional headshots. So you know how we roll at the AAA: we went ahead and just bought a bunch of licenses and offered them to any employees who are public-facing. We said, "We have this great new tool. You can use it in five minutes. Let us know if you want it and we'll send you a license." So we just got it for everybody, so everybody could upgrade their headshots.

And I don't know about you, but the last time I had headshots taken, I actually loved the photographer who did it — she was wonderful. She knew I hated the whole process. I mean, she wanted me to do hair and makeup (that just doesn't come naturally to me; I don't like it). Changing clothes I don't even like. It's awful for me. And so I feel like it was so hard on her to get everything out of me to get me some good headshots. This is the most exciting thing to me. I will probably always just use InstaHeadshots. And I sent them to you — you thought they looked kind of amazing.

Jen Leonard: Oh my gosh, they looked incredible. And I think my immediate reaction was, there's another industry disrupted, just for the reasons you're saying. The last time I had headshots taken, they were hundreds of dollars. And I really liked the photographer as well, but I had to drive to his location, you know, get all the pre-work done, think through outfits and hair and makeup, like you're saying. To have a workaround if you don't like that process seems incredible to me. But they looked incredible.

So, if Kris is listening — loved them. You always look great, but I was really, really blown away by the quality and also the realism of the photos.

Bridget McCormack: Yeah, they look incredible. How about you? What's your AI Aha! for this week?

Jen Leonard: So, a lot of people might be reading — if you're following the AI world — about Google's Notebook LM offering. And I had heard a few people that we follow on different podcasts talking about it, and I asked ChatGPT how to get access to it, found the URL. Notebook LM is powered by Google Gemini 1.5, I believe, which is their most cutting-edge model.

And essentially, you can create these little "notebooks" — they're called — that organize a whole bunch of content. You can upload audio files, PDF documents, Google documents if you use Google Drive. And you can do various things with them once you upload them. You can generate FAQs if you want to, or you can ask it to summarize the content. But the coolest feature is you can press this button called "Podcast" — it just says Podcast.

And it takes a few minutes, which is a little unusual for the AI world — I'm getting so spoiled now, I expect everything immediately. But after a few minutes, it will create a podcast that sounds like two people, and it really sounds human. Like, they use filler words, they use "likes" and "ums," they step on each other's lines, they're very exclamatory at different points, and they talk about the information that you've fed the notebook. So my colleague Marielle (whom you know) and I uploaded — together, to test this — an outline that we usually use for our Gen AI presentations, and then created a podcast. And it was so eerie. These two people started it, and they said, "You know, we talk a lot about AI on this show" — like this show that didn't exist until we hit "Podcast." "And this week, we're going to do a deep dive into an industry that is really primed for impact from AI: the legal profession." And it went through all the things in our outline, and it expanded on the bullet points in ways that were really, really nuanced and accurate.

There were a couple places where it used terminology that maybe wasn't perfect — like, I think it said "practice focus" instead of "practice areas" or something like that. But very, very minor adjustments. And I've had friends tell me that they have been using Notebook LM podcasting to listen to legal documents or analyses of legal documents on their way to and from work, when they wouldn't have the opportunity to actually read the documents. Like we talked about, they will read the documents eventually, but it really helps them understand what's in them through conversation. Have you seen this? Tried this?

Bridget McCormack: I haven't tried it yet, but my team has, and I can't wait to. And we have a board retreat coming up in December, and one of the pre-... it's not "reads," pre-"listens" — we're going to pick a couple of chapters from Frances Kellor's book. (Frances Kellor, as we've talked about, was the founder of the AAA almost a hundred years ago — a really, really fascinating woman.) And she has a couple of books about why she founded the AAA. And we're going to create a podcast out of a couple of the chapters for the board to listen to as they come into the retreat, which I think is a cool way to start the conversation.

Jen Leonard: That is very cool. You will be blown away by it. I think it is the creepiest and also the coolest thing I've seen AI do. I also thought — to segue into our topic for today of legal education — what a different world it would have been if I could have uploaded a Torts case to a podcast and then listened to people talk about it, as well as studying and briefing it the old-fashioned way. So I think it also opens up opportunities for neurodiverse learners and for people who want to hear discussions about the material, maybe before going to class. There are all sorts of applications coming out that I think will have exciting implications for legal education. So maybe we can move into our main topic for today.

Bridget, maybe you could describe for listeners your role with the ABA, currently focused on legal education, and some of the work that the ABA did earlier this year on a report about law schools' preparedness for generative AI.

Bridget McCormack: Yeah, so I am the immediate past Chair of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which is the accreditor for law schools. So I spend a lot of time on questions of accreditation — what does a law school need to be offering to be formally accredited? But this report that we're going to talk about was the result of another role that I have with the ABA right now: I'm on the Task Force on AI and Law. And there are a couple of subcommittees that I sit on, and one of them is on legal education. It's a very small subcommittee — three of us are on it: Cynthia Swick, who is a lawyer who actually practices ADR (so I know Cynthia separately), and Andy Perlman, who is our friend and the Dean of Suffolk Law School and a very innovative leader of that law school.

We decided that one of the things our subcommittee could offer was just to try and figure out the state of where law schools are in thinking about how to approach the fact that generative AI is changing the practice of law, the business of law, and sort of to see who's doing what about it. So we sent out a survey — as one does — to the almost 200 law schools that are accredited across the country, asking a number of questions about how they are thinking about AI in their institutions: teaching, if at all, AI, and in what kinds of classes and what kinds of experiences, or otherwise exposing students to this new technology that is poised to have such an important impact on the profession.

So at the very top, I should say that only 29 schools completed the survey and responded to it. Obviously that is a very small number, and it means there's no way to take the survey results as representative of what's happening — because who knows what's happening in the rest of them. My guess, though, is that the rest of the law schools likely didn't have a lot of answers to the questions because they just weren't doing anything yet, which is true of lots of institutions within the legal profession. So not a critique, just probably a statement of where folks are.

So with that caveat, we only got 29 responses. I can talk a little bit about the responses that we did get and what we learned, but I'll pause for a minute in case you have any reactions to the low response rate.

Jen Leonard: Yeah, I mean, it was my biggest takeaway when the study came out. I saw all the headlines in various publications about how law schools are immediately responding to the Gen AI moment — law schools have a proliferation of course offerings — which I was very curious about, because in my experience, law schools don't necessarily change their curriculum overnight. There's a whole deliberative process. So when I dug into the study, I was not surprised to see that only 29 law schools responded.

But I think the clarification is important, because when I visit with law firms in particular (they're reading the headlines and not the underlying report), their takeaway has been like, "We have confidence that the law schools are already responding and preparing students for a world transformed by generative AI." So I think it's important to understand that most law schools have not responded, for the reasons you've suggested. And I suspect that if you looked at the law schools that did respond, they're probably law schools that have been building a muscle for quite some time in integrating technology into their curriculum — like Suffolk, like you just mentioned, or Vanderbilt, or Chicago-Kent, those kinds of schools. So before we got into the results, I just thought it was important to highlight that, especially for people who may not be very connected with the law school world.

Bridget McCormack: One other related — but slightly off-topic — thing I want to say at the top is: one of my last acts as Chair of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar was to appoint a committee of Council members to take a look at what AI should mean to the accreditor, and if there are ways in which the accreditor can make sure it plays a constructive role in getting law schools to address this change that's coming in the profession. And Justice Melissa Hart from the Colorado Supreme Court is leading that task force, and she's fantastic. So I'm eager to see what they come up with in terms of ideas.

Okay, back to the survey. I'm just going to summarize a few of the findings. It's not very long if anybody wants to look at it — it's easily findable online — but I can summarize the findings. And what might be more interesting are a couple of questions that it raises that I think you and I could discuss.

So, of the 29 schools that responded:

  • 55% said they offer classes dedicated to teaching about AI (obviously that could mean a lot of things, but that was the number).
  • 83% said they provide opportunities for students to learn how to use AI tools.
  • 85% are considering curriculum changes in response to the way AI is changing the profession. That actually surprised me as low — 85% of 29 are thinking about curricular changes, when it feels to me like everybody should be thinking about what it means for your curriculum.
  • 69% of schools have updated their academic integrity policies, which of course is usually the first move we see in legal. Everyone sends out new policies about what you can't do with the technology; that turns out to be true in a lot of law schools as well.
  • 62% of law schools say they offer formal opportunities to learn about the use of AI in their first-year curriculum — which again could mean a lot of things. It might mean part of your legal writing class is where you are introduced to some of the tools. The schools all have diverse approaches; they're at lots of different stages, from proactive adoption to "we're thinking about it, we're not sure what we're gonna do yet." And the changes that are happening span from reassessing evaluation methods to introducing brand-new tools and sort of flagging and talking about ethical considerations.
  • 32% offer formal opportunities to engage with AI through partnerships with other university departments. I have to say, I think this is one place where universities that have a muscle for collaboration across units have an advantage. If you've heard me say it today, you've heard me say it every day: I think this is a moment for radical collaboration, and lawyers need partners to figure this out. So I think some of the universities that have those partners at the ready and have worked with them before have a real advantage.
  • 62% of schools are undecided about whether they're going to let applicants use generative AI in applications (which kind of cracks me up — I'm not sure how they'd let or not let them).
  • 31% of the respondents explicitly prohibit its use in applications (which also makes me laugh a little).

Anyway, so those are some of the things that we found from the schools that responded. And by the way, thank you to all the schools that did respond, especially the ones that responded and said, "We're not doing it yet." That's important for us to know, and we appreciated having that information. But it raises a lot of interesting questions, I think. And one is: you and I have talked a lot about how legal institutions are at a moment where they are facing the innovator's dilemma — the Clayton Christensen framework for what might happen when disruptive technology overtakes legacy successful institutions and processes. Do you think law schools fit that paradigm? Or do you think they're just kind of outside it because they have, you know, such a different culture and incentive structure? What's your view on whether law schools also have to worry about being disrupted right now?

Jen Leonard: I love that question. I do think that the framework of innovator's dilemma — in the sense that when dominant institutions or the leading incumbents emerged, they were innovative in their DNA at the beginning — applies. My understanding from early legal education structures that gave way to modern law schools is that it was an innovative approach. There were lots of really, really harmful parts of it that were designed around excluding people from the profession and requiring things that more regional schools couldn't provide, in response to the American Association of Law Schools and the ABA at the time. But setting those aside for a minute (as important as they are), the idea really was to create a space where students could focus on learning how to think like lawyers — learning critical thought processes and theory around the law. And then they would be, sort of, employed by — in the case of the Cravath model of dividing practice and education — they would be employed by law firms, who would then actually teach them the practical skills they needed to have. It was a really intentional divide that was trying to solve for the idea that it was complicated to learn both theory and practice at the same time, and it was done ad hoc in a local law office.

So the initial structure was really innovative and worked really well given the stakeholders that wanted to produce the results they produced. But over time, the core structure — because of the focus on theory and critical thought being central to the educational process — really incentivized and focused on the production of legal scholarship through the tenured faculty at a law school. So the tenured faculty would research and produce scholarship that would drive the profession forward, and there would be these dedicated, really high-level professionals to be able to think about the law itself. This coincided with the proliferation of regulations and laws in the early 20th century that really required having strong research capacity to understand and guide the profession.

But today, a lot of that core structure continues to exist. And we've seen lots of great changes in legal education, which is why I think it's a little different from an innovator's dilemma situation where there's been no change at all. We've had the rise of clinical programs, we've had the rise of legal writing as a core part of training new law students to prepare for entering practice. So it's not as though it's pure theory all the time in law school.

And I think it's a little bit different because the market forces that impact law schools are different from the market forces that would impact a for-profit company, for example, or even a law firm, as we're seeing law firms start to feel those. But one of the outcomes of this divide is that most of the thought around what law students need for their first employment opportunities out of law school takes place in the Career Strategy Office or the Professional Development Center of a law school. Not much of that conversation — explicitly tied to employment outcomes — happens in the tenured faculty arena, even though those are the stakeholders who make the decisions about what goes into the core curriculum. So I think that that divide is something that really holds law schools back in some ways from being responsive to the changing demands of practice.

And I'll cite my friend and colleague, Alice Armitage, who recently stepped down from her long-term role at UC San Francisco. Alice has talked about how the first year in particular — which is the year when everything is required and consistent across the board — is really designed to produce appellate lawyers in the way that we teach appellate case law and the way that we focus on oral argument, when most people are not going to pursue careers in appellate law. At the time, again, in those early days, that was really the predominant feature of legal education.

So I think that there are elements that really structurally impede us from responding quickly to the moment. But I would love to hear your thoughts about whether you think that law schools suffer from innovator's dilemma or whether they're different in some ways than other organizations.

Bridget McCormack: I agree with everything you said. I do think that they're different in some important ways, and then not different in some ways that make this an opportunity for some disruption in the legal education market, which is separate from, I think, the rest of the legal market. But it still is a market, right? Consumers are still making choices about where they want to spend a whole lot of tuition dollars and how they want to approach their learning. And you and I have talked many times about the way law school ranking systems are done and the way that ranking system inhibits innovation. And I think there's a little bit of an opportunity — a sort of innovator's dilemma opportunity — for some scrambling, at least in the way consumers think about what law schools they want to go to.

At least it feels possible to me that if you're thinking about spending a whole lot of money on three years of education for a profession that's changing very quickly right now, you're probably going to want to pay attention to something other than what U.S. News & World Report says about where that law school falls in these rankings that used metrics that were relevant 20 or 30 years ago, but are going to be a lot less relevant three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now. And you probably are going to want to figure out: where are the places where I can go learn about the ways in which this technology is going to change the profession? Because I want to be the kind of lawyer who graduates from law school and is ready to have an impact and also get a job.

You know, maybe it's sort of like a mini innovator's dilemma within a very bespoke marketplace. But I do think there are opportunities for the Suffolk Law Schools of the world to leapfrog a lot of other law schools that U.S. News & World Report would have said are ranked ahead of Suffolk for some metric that I don't think anyone's going to care much about in a few years. So if they care now... I don't know. Those are my thoughts. It's going to be fascinating to see what happens.

Jen Leonard: It's interesting too, because someday when somebody is writing the history of this period of legal education, generative AI sort of came on the heels of a lot of schools starting to step back from the U.S. News rankings, for all the reasons that you suggested, as well as reasons that don't prioritize the ability to be more inclusive in recruiting a student body. We're in an era where the U.S. News rankings are already becoming less important.

My suspicion — and I'm guessing here, but it's also informed by a couple of conversations I've had with prospective law students — is that because there's currently not another framework to use to select law schools, prospective students continue to use the U.S. News rankings right now to make decisions. So I wonder whether you have advice for people thinking about going to law school about why they should move beyond the rankings and what they should actually be looking for in their law schools.

Bridget McCormack: Yeah, I think this is such a great question. And to the extent people out there listen to this at all, I think this is a really important moment to look far beyond both the rankings and even the marketing materials that schools are producing about what their curriculum does and doesn't do. I mean — well, what it does do; there aren't many marketing materials on what they don't do. But that would be kind of cool, actually. Imagine a school saying, "We're not going to do that, so if you want to do that, go elsewhere." I could create those materials, by the way, for a lot of schools. I might have to. I have this in my head — we should do this. It would be fun.

I think you want to actually ask questions and figure out who the right person is — probably somebody who's an administrator, not necessarily a faculty member. Faculty members tend to be focused on their research and their own teaching, and especially during the semester it's hard for them to have a sense of what else is happening in and around the law school. So I think you might want to find the administrator whose job it is to help you think through this important question, and ask these very specific questions about how they're approaching learning, professional development, and the changing profession as a result of generative AI. I would have my list of questions about this topic ready to go, and I'd go find that person. You don't have to go physically — you can call them, you can Zoom them — but I would want to ask those questions. You must have people asking you this already. Do you have advice?

Jen Leonard: Yeah, I mean, most relevantly, my stepdaughter is thinking about going to law school. So I talk with her a lot. And just because of the roles I've had, I have people connect prospective students to me. Some of my advice is exactly the same as it would have been five or ten years ago, which is: if you're just graduating undergrad, I definitely recommend taking a couple of years to work, to figure out what you actually enjoy doing and whether that aligns with what lawyers actually do on the ground day to day.

I think, to the credit of law schools, they have done a good job in the last 10 years of really looking for students who have prior work experience to make sure that they are attending law school for thoughtful reasons and are informed by professional experience. So I do think that's a good change. But I think the additional piece here is not only learning about yourself and what you like, but seeing how things unfold in the next few years in the profession and what the life of a lawyer looks like three to five years from now, and whether that is something that you're really interested in pursuing.

And then, to your point, I think really interrogating the offerings around generative AI and technology generally. One thing we didn't really talk about in describing law school education is that because of the centrality of critical thinking and understanding the substance of the law, in many cases law schools are not as focused on thinking about how technology is integrated into practice to do things beyond those core "thinking like a lawyer" critical thought, legal research, and writing aspects. So I would want to know: what is the history of your school in terms of thinking about technology as part of preparation for being a lawyer? Is that integrated into the core curriculum, or are they only electives that are offered? Do you have tenured faculty members who focus on not just the substance of technology law, but actually how to use technology in practice?

And then I think you just said something that made me think of another piece, which is the metacognition and lifelong learning piece. The world is changing too quickly to have three static years of your life prepare you for the rest of your profession. So how does your school help me understand how I learn as a lawyer, and what skills I'll need to continually develop beyond the typical CLE every year, in a rapidly changing world? I'd be really curious, actually, to know the answers from some schools on that last piece, because it's a lot harder to conceptualize, communicate, and integrate into a curriculum.

Bridget McCormack: That's super helpful. While you were talking, I was thinking: yeah, some of the things I would want to learn right now are leadership, change management, creativity, and collaborative work arrangements with unusual partners. And those are things that are not in the traditional curriculum at law schools. There are some law schools that teach leadership courses — in fact, our friend Jim Sandman teaches one at Penn, which is an amazing course — but there are some human skills that have become more important, and I'd want to have some sense of how the law school at least thinks about those skills and values them and thinks that they are teaching them. I'm not saying you can't teach them within some of the traditional curriculum — I think you can; it just depends on how you're teaching that traditional curriculum.

We should do a checklist for law students who are applying — a list of the kinds of things they might want to think about asking. I think that would be a useful thing for us to put out into the world.

Jen Leonard: Definitely. I think as much information as prospective law students have, the current changes in the profession and what they mean for your school selection have not reached the people that need it the most. And I don't know that there is even — like you're saying — a checklist for what you should be thinking about in the AI era as you go to law school. So we should definitely do that. And maybe we should do a whole other episode, too, thinking about some of these things. We only have a couple of minutes left, but I'm wondering: what changes would you make if you could wave a magic wand and transform legal education? What do you think law schools should be doing right now?

Bridget McCormack: So, with full understanding that law schools don't have unfettered freedom to just do whatever they want — because the accreditor requires them to do an awful lot of specific things — this is not a critique of any law school that's not doing this. But you've heard me say this even before generative AI: I would have law students, before they sit in the classroom and read appellate cases, spend the first few weeks in state courtrooms where people are trying to manage their justice problems — most of whom are managing them without lawyers, because most people in the US can't afford lawyers. So when they started studying the law, they understood that there was an enormous set of challenges that we need their creativity and big ideas to fix. I really think we could point creative law students — before we beat the creativity out of them in law school — at some of the biggest challenges in the profession.

And I now think that this technology just gives them new tools to think about how to solve those problems. It excites me to think about giving incoming law students the power to use those tools, and the information about what they might use them for, that I think could really change some of the biggest problems in the profession. It would be a really exciting time to be a creative dean who could figure out how to do all the things that the accreditor says you should do — I understand that — but also aim talented law students with these really powerful tools at some of the biggest problems in the legal system. Do you know Anna Carpenter, who's now the Dean at Oklahoma?

Jen Leonard: Yes. She doesn't know me, but I know of her, because I followed her frequently when I was in the law student professional development world.

Bridget McCormack: She's amazing. I want to catch up with Anna and see what she's thinking about in this interesting moment, because she's always doing some pretty innovative things around access to justice. And I'm sure she's thinking about what's possible right now. Andy Perlman as well. There are definitely deans out there for whom this is going to be a really interesting moment. So yeah, I think we could have a lot more conversation about this if we want to take it up again in another episode.

Jen Leonard: Yeah, I think we should do that. There's so much to dig into here, and we can learn a little bit more about some of the work that we're doing at the AAA to partner with Suffolk and others right now to drive change in legal education. So we'll leave this here for now, but I do think there are other topics we could explore in a future episode — maybe after we've caught up with some of our favorite creative deans — and offer some helpful guidance for other deans trying to drive change. It's not easy at all, so I want to make it clear that we understand that as well.

Bridget McCormack: Yeah, I think that's a great idea. Future episode — tune back in. 

Jen Leonard: All right, so we're going to go make some podcasts on Notebook LM with all of our documents and audio files. Maybe we'll feed our podcast into Notebook LM and have it make a new podcast, and compare and contrast. It's going to get weird really fast.