Mark Lemley gives his students a set of questions with AI-generated answers as part of their IP Law final. The challenge: Grade AI’s answers.

“A new lawyer going into practice will likely start a draft with an AI tool. Figuring out what’s wrong, making sure the citations are right, seeing what’s missing in an argument and what could have been better are important,” says Lemley (BA ’88), William H. Neukom Professor of Law and one of the country’s leading thinkers on intellectual property and AI. In addition to being a law professor and prolific scholar, Lemley is an entrepreneur and legal practitioner who co-founded the data analytics company Lex Machina. “That kind of judgment is something that lawyers will need more and more.”

The relationship between law schools and law firms in educating new lawyers is inherently complementary. The partnership is as true in the training of the effective and responsible use of AI as in any other aspect.

Jeff Karpf, JD ’94, managing partner of Cleary Gottlieb, compares the need to learn legal AI to the early training he received on Westlaw and LexisNexis. “There’s always different upskilling required in the legal profession. That’s not new,” says Karpf. “It’s on us—law schools and law firms—to train future lawyers as new technology evolves.”

The landscape seems likely to change: As firms rapidly embrace legal AI, many of the tasks once assigned to junior associates—from reviewing contracts to managing discovery, the tasks that helped to initiate them into practice—are being handed over to AI. In addition to developing AI tools to help junior associates learn these important legal skills, Stanford Law School is adapting its curriculum to meet new expectations for AI competency. This includes building out classroom offerings, developing library-run training modules, providing makerspaces for building AI agents, and weaving AI training into the clinical program, among other efforts.

A TECH CONTINUUM

“Stanford Law is embracing an unprecedented pace of real-time curricular development,” notes Dean George Triantis, JSD ’89, Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean. “We’re reviewing more products at once than I’ve seen in my career,” says Beth Williams, the Robert Crown Law Library’s associate dean and senior lecturer in law. “It is probably a bit like the early days of Lexis and Westlaw, but this is that moment on steroids.”

Over the past two years, Williams and her team have developed an AI framework that stretches across research guidance, pedagogy, technical development, and training for the full law school community. To extend that work, the library recently added two AI-focused librarians—one specializing in data science and AI, the other in emerging AI technologies—positions Williams believes are the first of their kind in U.S. academic law libraries.

“Among other things, these roles will let us build more tools ourselves, not just consume what the market produces,” she says. “We have been able to move forward with a lot of momentum for a few reasons. We have the advantage of geography, of course, but it’s more than that. Our librarians were experimenting with AI long before anyone asked them to. In fact, much of our AI infrastructure happened organically. People on the team saw where the future was headed and moved quickly in that direction.”

“SUMMER READY”

“I’d be concerned if a junior associate didn’t know how to use these tools,” says Emily Kapur, JD ’15 (PhD ’17, BA ’08), a partner at Quinn Emanuel. “They are an essential part of the business.”

Critical AI training at Stanford Law begins in the 1L year. Alicia Thesing, JD ’00, directs Stanford Law’s Legal Research and Writing program. For first-year students, legal AI has been part of the curriculum for the past two years. “‘Summer ready’ is always my guiding star,” says Thesing, referring to the summer associate positions and governmental or nonprofit internships that follow the first year of law school. The training begins when students are introduced to the basics of legal writing in a closed universe, without AI tools.

“By spring, we are simulating a summer work experience with disputes over a contract and discovery. We integrate AI into our workflow, putting the AI tools to use in various applications.” The applications include spotting legal issues, summarizing discovery documents, drafting research emails, editing, and so on. In this way, “we showcase some of the ways you can use AI in lawyering,” Thesing explains. “And we build in time to reflect on using these tools productively, efficiently, and responsibly.” At the Mills Legal Clinic, students are immersed for a quarter in a law firm setting with close faculty supervision.

“We operate like a law firm but a teaching one, so context is critical,” says Bernice Grant, professor of law and director of the Entrepreneurship Clinic. Grant’s research includes looking at the impact of technology on transactional practice. “We focus a lot on the risks because we know that lawyers have gotten into trouble using AI inappropriately, particularly litigators who have cited cases that don’t exist. We want to make sure that they have that context before jumping right into AI and working with clients.”

Training has extended to postgraduate work too. Stanford Law’s Executive Education program has launched a self-paced online course designed to offer the technical grounding required for this transformative moment. AI Strategy for Legal Leaders draws on insights from a broad group of legal, business, and technology experts who have been working on the ground with generative AI.

“Legal leaders are on the hook for AI strategy whether they feel ready or not,” says Adam Sterling, associate dean for executive education. “We built this course to give them the fluency and frameworks they need to speak credibly in the C-suite and to lead, not just react, as AI reshapes their organizations.”

Karpf praises the new AI training—but says the school’s older, longer-term investments in experiential learning may be just as important. Over the past 20 years, he notes, Stanford has expanded its clinical education and policy programs in ways that give students experience with real clients while building the judgment, leadership, and emotional intelligence he believes will matter even more as AI takes on routine legal tasks.

“Managing an AI tool is a lot like managing a member of the team,” he says. “You need to ask the right questions, formulate the right prompts, make sure you’re homing in on the right things and not forgetting important questions.”

Preparation matters because, once in practice, junior associates reviewing AI-generated work will be responsible for ensuring its accuracy.

“The more we use AI, the more we need a human who will be tasked with confirming that we abide by our obligations to the court and to our clients,” says Kapur. “Junior associates are often being asked to step into that role—to be absolutely certain that every assertion is correct—even when there’s a negative assertion, which is sometimes the hardest to confirm. They need to handle that responsibility well.”

Many law firms are embracing legal AI, and sharing their expertise with Stanford Law School, where industry experts in AI are coming to campus to teach the next generation.

“It’s gratifying to see the energy over the potential of AI agents as another example of the dynamic character of legal education at Stanford,” says Triantis. “Decades ago, the school anticipated the importance of interdisciplinary study and of applied clinical experience to the development of lawyers. Our goal is to be as prescient today in anticipating and preparing for the transformative impact of AI technology.”

And as AI adds a powerful tool to the legal toolkit, the value of human counseling remains.

“A lot of my job involves counseling my clients and helping them to understand the legal process, which can be frustrating to them,” says Kapur of her broad and complex practice.

It is, she says, the relationships that she has built over her career that count the most—with or without AI.

“That human aspect of being a lawyer—being able to understand what really matters and to explain it and being able to understand what the experience is like for clients—matters so much and will not be replaced by technology.” SL