Often, learning about the law feels more like a history class than preparation to be a lawyer. The average 1L spends hours upon hours memorizing the dates and facts of cases that aren’t even good law anymore — otherwise known as studying Constitutional law. To contrast, students taking classes on the legal field’s rapid adoption of AI have to keep up with changing companies, developing technology and expectations of privacy as they incorporate AI in to their toolkit. It is hard to look for experienced thinkers in novel fields, but the students at Columbia lucked in to getting a Biglaw partner to school them on AI. Law.com has coverage:
This spring, Columbia Law School introduced a new course titled “Law of Artificial Intelligence,” taught by Michel Paradis, a Steptoe partner with a Ph.D. in computational linguistics. Paradis told Legaltech News he wanted to remedy an emerging gap between AI systems’ increasing relevance as a substantive legal area and a general lack of knowledge among the legal profession about how they work.
“People become lawyers typically because they’re smart and they don’t like math. … When you get these technical questions that can really matter to the outcome of a case, it helps to really know what’s going on under the hood,” he said. “There was this real gap between a basic competence in what’s going on technically and how that should impact the legal issues involved.”
And the impact is real — an assistant US attorney recently resigned after a federal judge threatened to sanction him and his office for repeated AI misuse and misquoting holdings. And on the other side of the gavel, even judges are getting caught using AI to help write their opinions without knowing to check their work before they submitted everything.
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Besides covering what not to do, the course will focus on regulatory responses to AI adoption and what increased use of AI means for intellectual property. I know I dunked on Conlaw earlier, but the relationship between AI adoption and Article 1 Section 8 is definitely worth hashing out in a classroom. Much of the push against IP protections comes from billionaires, it’s an open question whether constitutional protections are strong enough to bear the force of financial interests attacking them at every turn.
Sounds like a fun course! As long as AI is here, law schools should be doing their best to prepare students for using it in their work product if they choose to do so.
Columbia Law School Gets Technical With New AI Course Led by Steptoe Partner [Law.com]
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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.