The Law School of Tomorrow: AI and the Future of Lawyer Training

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or iHeart

Katherine Hughes hosts the latest podcast from the City Bar’s Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies. She is joined by WashU Law Dean Stefanie Lindquist and AI Collaborative Co-Director Oliver Roberts to discuss how generative AI is reshaping law school teaching, assessment, and professional preparation.

Dean Lindquist describes her wake-up call about student AI use, making AI a central dean priority, forming an AI task force, partnering with Roberts, and hiring an LLM engineer to support experimentation and tool-building. Roberts traces early experiences with hallucinated citations and argues AI education must go beyond AI regulation to hands-on tool use across legal workflows, core terminology, tool selection, and explicit ethics (competence, confidentiality, supervision, and overreliance).

They discuss institutional guardrails such as eliminating take-home exams, using simulations, workflow-based pedagogy, and new assessment ideas like oral exams and quizzing students on submitted work. They also note scholarship and journal pressures and conclude that lawyers who can’t use AI will be replaced by those who can.

02:13 Why AI Became Institutional

03:50 Oliver’s AI Origin Story

05:34 Faculty Misconceptions

07:26 JD Learning Outcomes

09:58 Core AI Competencies

13:04 Schoolwide Guardrails

16:56 Teaching Ethics Through Scenarios

21:19 Hidden Ethics Pitfalls

23:56 Rethinking Assessment

27:10 Drafting And Disclosure

32:05 Workflows In Practice

35:41 Handling Faculty Skepticism

38:08 AI In Clinics

40:10 Scholarship And Journals

43:05 Closing Advice