Artificial intelligence is no longer a peripheral issue for legal education. It is quickly becoming one of the central questions facing law schools: how to prepare future lawyers for a profession in which AI will affect research, client counseling, litigation strategy, access to justice, and the business of law.

For decades, law schools treated legal technology as an elective or a niche interest for students already inclined toward innovation. That era is ending. Law firms are adopting AI tools at scale and even investing in developing their own tools. Clients are asking harder questions about efficiency, cost, and competence. Courts are sanctioning lawyers and litigants for AI-generated hallucinations, with the number of identified cases in the United States now exceeding 1,000. Students entering the profession will be expected to keep up with this rapidly changing landscape.

The most forward-looking law schools are responding accordingly. That transformation is being driven in large part by a group of innovative law school deans who are treating AI not as a passing trend, but as a structural change in legal education. For example, Case Western Reserve University School of Law and the Mississippi Christian University School of Law became the first two law schools to implement a first-year AI certification requirement. Suffolk University Law School and UNLV’s William S. Boyd School of Law have also adopted required AI coursework for first-year students. Other law schools have taken a different approach, introducing students to AI and law through legal research and writing courses, experiential programs, AI-focused clinics, technology labs, or interdisciplinary centers.

These initiatives signal a broader shift in legal academia where law schools are no longer merely debating whether AI belongs in the curriculum. The more pressing question is how deeply, how early, and how responsibly AI should be integrated into legal education. To better understand that transformation, we asked several of the deans leading this work how their institutions are responding to AI, what opportunities they see, and what risks law schools must confront.

Andrew Perlman | Dean, Suffolk University Law School

Led by Dean Andrew Perlman, Suffolk University Law School has taken a whole-curriculum approach to AI. At the foundation is a required generative AI learning track within the 1L Legal Practice Skills course.

Students who want to go deeper can pursue Suffolk’s Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) concentration, which combines hands-on technology training, process-improvement coursework, and broader study of how legal services are being redesigned. Suffolk also operates the LIT Lab, where students function as a research-and-development consultancy, building practical tools for courts, legal aid organizations, and other justice-system stakeholders. The school’s newest flagship initiative is the AAA-Suffolk ODR Innovation Clinic, a partnership with the American Arbitration Association to design an AI-enabled online dispute resolution process for unrepresented litigants in low-conflict divorce and family law matters in Massachusetts.

Dean Perlman describes the challenge of AI education as twofold: law schools must “prepare students for the AI-enhanced world they're actually entering, while ensuring they develop the legal knowledge, human-centered skills, and judgment required to use these tools effectively and responsibly.”

Perlman, who regards AI as “the most consequential technology in the history of the legal profession,” also sees AI competence as a professional advantage for new lawyers. In his view, graduates who can help a law firm or legal department use AI more effectively will be positioned not merely to keep pace with the profession, but to distinguish themselves from day one.

Perlman, however, identifies one major concern: “cognitive offloading,” or the temptation for students to outsource the analytical work through which lawyers develop expertise. He describes this risk as the “central pedagogical challenge of this moment” and emphasizes the need for law schools to find the “right balance” between embracing AI tools and preserving the formation of foundational lawyering skills.

Stefanie Lindquist | Dean, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law

Since Dean Stefanie Lindquist assumed the deanship in 2024, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law has risen to No. 13 in the U.S. News rankings. One of her central priorities has been positioning WashU Law as a leader in AI education and training—both in the U.S. and abroad.

Lindquist describes WashU’s approach as creating a comprehensive AI ecosystem. At the center of that effort is the WashU Law AI Collaborative, a cross-disciplinary initiative that advises on the development of AI curricula for students, alumni, and practicing attorneys; convenes an expert advisory board of legal technology entrepreneurs, judges, and LLM engineers; supports a student AI Fellowship program with engineering assistance; develops an international consortium of law schools; and maintains active partnerships with leading legal AI platforms, including Harvey, Spellbook, and Relativity.

WashU Law has also been an early mover in AI training for the judiciary, including programs designed to help courts navigate the practical, ethical, and evidentiary issues raised by AI in litigation. WashU Law has provided specialized AI training to judges of the D.C. Court of Appeals, Pennsylvania state court trial judges, and judges in the Northern District of Mississippi and the Eastern District of Missouri, underscoring the school’s growing role in educating not only future lawyers but also sitting judges.

According to Lindquist, WashU has also expanded its AI footprint internationally. Through the AI Collaborative, the law school has developed partnerships with law schools worldwide, including the University of Nottingham, Utrecht University, Universidad de La Sabana, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Fudan University, and the University of Queensland School of Law. As Lindquist explained, these international partnerships are intended to extend WashU Law’s reach in AI and legal innovation and allow the school to learn and lead on a global stage.

Lindquist states that “AI will not replace lawyers,” but emphasizes that “lawyers who know how to deploy the technology to advance their practices will replace lawyers who do not.” She believes that integrating AI into educational programs, while recognizing its risks, is essential for preparing future lawyers.

Adam Chilton | Dean, University of Chicago Law School

Dean Adam Chilton describes the University of Chicago Law School’s approach to AI as distinctively “Chicago.” The school is integrating AI into legal education while preserving the habits of analysis, judgment, and independent thinking that define its intellectual culture.

Chicago Law’s AI offerings include the AI Lab, where students design and launch AI-powered legal aid tools. The school also offers a self-guided introductory AI course for 1Ls and provides institutional licenses for leading legal AI platforms. Rather than treating AI as a stand-alone subject, Chicago is making targeted changes throughout the JD curriculum, with reforms “tailored to achieve specific AI learning outcomes, encouraging the use of AI when conducive to professional development, and steering students away from uses of AI that are detrimental to learning.”

Chilton frames the school’s approach around a dual mandate: students must learn to think both “without machines” and “with machines.” To that end, Chicago has developed AI-resilient pedagogy and assessment methods designed to ensure that AI supports, rather than substitutes for, legal education.

For Chilton, the starting point remains clear: “students first and foremost have to learn how to think critically, strategically, and deeply, and do so without relying on machines.” He believes the best way for law schools to adapt to an AI-shaped profession is by elevating the “essential human” skills that distinguish excellent lawyers in a world where many legal tasks are being automated.

As he puts it, “a law school now must ensure that the lawyer of tomorrow is able to add unique human value for their clients and appropriately navigate responsible, effective, and ethical use of AI.”

George Triantis | Dean, Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School has approached AI through a combination of curriculum, research centers, interdisciplinary coursework, and access-to-justice projects. Unlike schools that are now building legal AI programs from the ground up, Stanford’s work builds on a longer institutional history in law and technology, including the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

The school’s current AI-related work is organized in part through the Stanford Law AI Initiative, which coordinates activity across the school’s centers, clinics, faculty projects, curriculum, and external partnerships. The Initiative focuses on six areas: the legal profession, healthcare, legal technology, access to justice, government regulation and policy, and intellectual property. That structure reflects the breadth of AI’s relevance to law schools: AI is not only changing how lawyers work, but also raising questions about regulation, institutional design, public policy, and access to legal services.

In the classroom, over 10 courses are offered, such as Business Leadership for Lawyers in the Age of AI, Building an AI Toolkit for Audit and Tax, and Governing Artificial Intelligence: Law, Policy, and Institutions. One of the school’s most distinctive offerings is Policy Practicum: AI for Legal Help, a two-quarter, hands-on course now in its fourth year. In that course, law, design, computer science, and policy students work with legal aid organizations and court self-help centers to design, build, and evaluate AI tools for unrepresented litigants. Student teams produce practical deliverables, including benchmark datasets, user-experience research reports, system design proposals, and prototype concepts, while addressing legal needs in areas such as eviction, criminal records, housing disputes, and other access-to-justice challenges.

Stanford’s longer-running legal technology infrastructure is CodeX—the Center for Legal Informatics, which has been working on the mechanization and computational analysis of legal reasoning for decades, well before “legal AI” became commonplace. CodeX hosts the annual FutureLaw conference and, in April 2026, hosted a two-day Agentic AI & Law Bootcamp, where interdisciplinary Stanford student teams designed and prototyped agentic AI applications at the intersection of technology and law.

More recently, Stanford launched the Legal Innovation through Frontier Technology Lab, or liftlab, led by Professor Julian Nyarko and Executive Director Megan Ma. The lab brings together legal scholarship, prototyping, and collaboration with industry to study how frontier technologies may affect legal work, legal training, and access to justice. Dean George Triantis describes liftlab as an effort to bring together “rigorous research and real-world collaboration to shape how emerging technologies can enhance legal judgment, training, and access to justice.”

Neel U. Sukhatme | Dean, University of Michigan Law School 

Under Dean Neel U. Sukhatme’s leadership, the University of Michigan Law School is advancing AI education through courses, clinics, institutional leadership, and cross-campus collaboration.

 The school has introduced several AI-focused courses, including Artificial Intelligence and the Law, Digital Lawyering: Advocacy & AI, and AI Sandbox. It has also launched an AI Law Policy Clinic, where students work with courts and legal services providers to develop and implement AI-enabled tools in real-world settings. For alumni and practitioners, Michigan offers AI for Lawyers and Other Advocates, an online course designed to build AI literacy across the profession.

Michigan has also built institutional infrastructure around AI. The law school has established leadership roles, including Head of Emerging Technology and Director of AI Initiatives, and formed an AI advisory council with representatives from law, technology, business, government, and the nonprofit sector. A mini-grant program supports faculty innovation in AI research and teaching.

Michigan is also pursuing cross-university partnerships that draw on the university’s strengths in computer science, engineering, business, public policy, and other fields. As Sukhatme notes, “Many of the most important questions raised by AI are inherently interdisciplinary.”

For Sukhatme, AI presents opportunities both inside and beyond the classroom. He sees technology as a tool for expanding access to justice and for helping students develop as researchers, writers, and problem solvers across fields such as law, public policy, and medicine. At the same time, he emphasizes that Michigan Law “will emphasize the responsible use of AI as a complement to, rather than substitute for, development of foundational skills.”

Sukhatme recognizes that the rapid evolution of AI creates significant challenges for law schools, particularly in “curriculum development, faculty support, assessment, and institutional policy.” But he is clear that technological change does not displace the core work of legal education. Lawyers must still learn to “exercise judgment and counsel clients,” even as the tools of practice change.

More broadly, Sukhatme wants Michigan Law students to understand that lawyers have a central role to play in shaping the future of AI. As he puts it, legal education should “instill a belief that, as lawyers, we have a critical role to play in ensuring that these new technologies actually serve human needs and human values.”

Paul Rose | Dean, Case Western Reserve University School of Law

Dean Paul Rose has placed Case Western Reserve University School of Law at the forefront of legal AI education nationally. In 2025, Case Western launched its Introduction to AI and the Law course, the first legal AI certification program required for first-year law students at a U.S. law school. Developed with Wickard.ai, the program gives students hands-on training in AI-powered legal tools, large language models, prompt engineering, legal research, ethical obligations, emerging regulation, and responsible AI use.

In 2026, Case Western took that first-in-the-nation program a step further. Every 1L was again required to complete Introduction to AI and the Law, but this time the curriculum also required students to develop their own legal technology tools through AI-assisted “vibe coding.” Students identified real problems lawyers face in practice and built functional prototype tools to address issues such as court-rule tracking, billing automation, citation validation, jury selection, judge analytics, and AI use policies in courts. Rose describes the program goal as the ability for students to “move beyond AI understanding and into technology creation,” and “understand, through their own planning and design, the strengths and limitations inherent in working with them.”

For Rose, AI education must be integrated into the broader law school curriculum rather than treated as a discrete technology exercise. His approach is to have students first apply AI tools to simulated legal problems and then, over time, to actual legal problems in the school’s clinics. That progression, he believes, allows students to develop practical skills that are becoming increasingly valuable in the legal market.

Rose also sees AI changing the structure of legal practice itself. As firms begin not only to use AI tools but also to develop their own AI technologies, he expects growing demand for lawyers who can work on AI governance committees and serve as legal AI technology and compliance specialists. That shift, he notes, will require “more training and more capable trainers.”

Although Rose is optimistic about AI’s potential, he cautions against overreliance. He warns that excessive dependence on AI tools can hinder the development of legal research, analytical reasoning, writing, and advocacy skills. He also emphasizes the ethical and professional responsibility issues raised by AI, including the potential for bias in AI systems. For Rose, those risks do not counsel against AI education. They underscore why law schools must teach students to use these tools carefully, critically, and competently.

Leah Chan Grinvald | Dean, William S. Boyd School of Law at UNLV

Dean Leah Chan Grinvald has positioned UNLV’s William S. Boyd School of Law as one of the law schools moving AI education into the required curriculum. Beginning in Fall 2026, Boyd Law will require first-year students to take Introduction to Responsible Use of AI, a course co-taught by Professors Nancy Rapoport and Joe Regalia.

The course is designed to go beyond basic exposure to AI tools and platforms. It will examine how AI is being used in legal practice, the professional responsibilities lawyers must observe when using these technologies, and the more fundamental question of whether AI should perform certain legal tasks at all. In addition to developing this required first-year course, Grinvald is expanding Boyd Law’s upper-level curriculum to include additional AI-related offerings and supporting faculty research in the field.

 Grinvald notes that Boyd Law “has always been known for innovation,” but says the school has been “approaching AI with caution.” That caution reflects a central concern in legal education: students may lose their ability to read and analyze legal texts if they become too dependent on tools that can summarize cases quickly and fluently.

 For Grinvald, the challenge is not whether law schools should teach AI, but how to do so without compromising the development of foundational legal skills. Because graduates will need to use AI in practice, law schools must prepare them to do so responsibly while still ensuring that they can read carefully, reason independently, and exercise professional judgment. Grinvald sees the new mandatory course as an important step toward striking that balance.

Darby Dickerson | President & Dean, Southwestern Law School 

Under Dean Darby Dickerson’s leadership, Southwestern Law School has taken a comprehensive approach to AI education, beginning at orientation and extending throughout the JD program. The school has revised its foundational LAWS courses to incorporate AI and introduced an AI & the Law micro-credential badge for all students, developed with Wickard.ai.

Beginning in Fall 2026, Southwestern will take another major step by requiring all first-year law students to complete the AI & the Law course. The course will emphasize hands-on AI training, legal ethics, professional responsibility, and the responsible integration of AI into legal research, writing, analysis, and practice.

Southwestern has also built institutional infrastructure to support its expansion of AI education. The school has created a new Vice Dean and Vice President for Academic AI and Emerging Technologies position and recently appointed a dedicated AI Integration and Engagement Lead. At the same time, Southwestern has preserved faculty autonomy in how they incorporate AI in individual courses, within a broader institutional framework focused on professional competence, ethical accountability, and responsible use.

 For Dickerson, the central issue is not whether law schools should ban AI, but how they should define legal competence in an AI-enabled profession. Southwestern does not “impose a general ban on AI,” she explains. Instead, the school asks: “What does it now mean to be a competent lawyer?” That question has become more urgent because a “student can generate a strong draft of a memo, brief, or a client letter in seconds or minutes,” requiring law schools to be more deliberate about identifying what students must know and be able to do.

Dickerson is also clear about the risks. AI can produce work that is “fluent, confident, and wrong,” and students can become overly dependent on AI before they develop the professional judgment necessary to supervise it. That combination, she warns, is “dangerous.” For that reason, Southwestern’s approach emphasizes not only exposure to AI tools but also the judgment required to evaluate, revise, and take responsibility for AI-assisted work.

At the same time, Dickerson sees AI as a powerful learning partner when used intentionally. Students can use AI to “generate practice questions, receive rapid feedback, and explore different perspectives and approaches to an issue.” She also sees significant potential for AI to improve efficiency and expand access in the legal profession, allowing lawyers to focus more of their time on strategy, counseling, negotiation, advocacy, and the human dimensions of representation, while hopefully reducing costs for clients.

John P. Anderson | Dean, Mississippi Christian University School of Law

Under Dean John P. Anderson’s leadership, Mississippi Christian University School of Law partnered with Wickard.ai to become the first law school in the Southeast to require an AI boot camp and certification exam for all first-year students. The program drew national attention, including coverage in The Washington Post, which described MC Law as “among the first in the nation” to require legal AI education.

The program was designed to ensure that students graduate with a working understanding of how to use AI tools effectively, ethically, and responsibly. Dean Anderson said he “wants the firms hiring our students to be confident that every MC Law grad is competent in AI technologies.”

To support its AI initiatives, MC Law secured $1.2 million in funding to establish the Center for AI Policy and Technology Leadership (CAPTL), a joint initiative with the MC School of Business. The Center aims to advise state leadership on AI technology and offers several courses, including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and the Law; Cybersecurity and Data Privacy; AI, Machine Learning, and the Practice of Law; and a writing seminar on Emerging Issues in AI and the Law.

Anderson is “laser focused on the impact of AI on legal education,” recognizing the significant potential of these technologies. He notes that students’ future employers “will expect familiarity with these AI tools,” and believes MC Law students “may even be able to teach some of the more experienced attorneys at their firms a thing or two about the effective use of these tools.”

Anderson is focused on improving access to justice and highlights AI’s potential to level the playing field for smaller practices. “When used effectively, responsibly, and ethically, AI tools can help solo practitioners or small firms go toe-to-toe with larger firms and corporations with greater financial resources,” he noted. He also emphasized that in the nation's “legal deserts,” AI competency could enable practitioners to expand their reach and enhance community access to legal services.

He also notes that essential skills, such as “reading a room,” cannot be replaced by AI and should remain a focus in law schools.

Johanna Kalb | Dean, University of San Francisco School of Law

Dean Johanna Kalb has made the University of San Francisco School of Law a leader in the integration of AI into the curriculum. USF Law has directly integrated AI learning outcomes into the required core curriculum.

Beginning in the first year, students engage with AI in Legal Research, Writing, and Analysis. Required AI-related competencies have also been incorporated into upper-division courses, including Professional Responsibility and Evidence. The goal, Kalb explains, is to ensure that students understand how large language models can support core lawyering tasks and legal workflows while also confronting the ethical, security, and reliability concerns that arise when lawyers use AI technologies.

USF is also using AI to reimagine experiential learning. AI-powered simulations allow students to practice lawyering skills that are difficult to scale in large classes. In some courses, students can conduct client interviews, navigate negotiations, and repeatedly and independently test strategic decision-making. These experiences are designed to help students graduate with tangible practice skills and greater confidence as they enter internships and legal employment.

Kalb emphasizes “pedagogy over technology” and ensures that faculty address a specific learning challenge. For example, Professor Nicole Phillips has developed custom AI learning tools that “allow students to rehearse classroom dialogue and legal reasoning in a low-stakes environment.”

Kalb also highlights that AI tools are replacing tasks traditionally performed by junior attorneys across many practice areas, thereby threatening entry-level hiring for new graduates. “Law schools need to prepare students to graduate with the skill level of a current third or fourth-year attorney in order to contribute to many areas of the profession,” she says.

USF’s location in San Francisco has also given the law school access to leading AI companies and startups. Since 2024, the school has established partnerships with Anthropic, Accordance, Legora, and other SF-based companies.