AI Lab is Coming to UChicago Law:

Imagine that you’re sitting in a law school classroom learning how to build a generative AI tool. Now imagine that this tool you create is released to millions of people to help them understand and navigate the law. Starting this fall, this scenario will become reality for students at the University of Chicago Law School thanks to a new course called the AI Lab.

“It’s unlike anything we have ever done,” said William H. J. Hubbard, the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law and deputy dean. “This initiative is not merely about helping students understand how to use AI tools in their legal work, it’s about creating AI tools so that students are standing in the shoes of a tech entrepreneur.”

Hubbard is chair of the Law School’s AI committee, which for the last two years has been keeping a pulse on AI use in the legal profession and finding ways to incorporate AI into the curriculum. The AI Lab is just one initiative to come out of these efforts—and it’s perhaps the most innovative one yet.

“We want our students to be prepared to succeed professionally in the intersecting space of AI and the law, which is only going to keep growing,” said Hubbard. “This new opportunity will allow students to learn about it in a very immersive, hands-on way, and from an expert who has tangible experience.”

That expert is Kimball Dean Parker, ’13, a lawyer turned legal tech entrepreneur—who is also a former student of Hubbard. Passionate about harnessing technology to help people and businesses navigate the complexities of the law, Parker is founder and CEO of SixFifty, a tech company that assists businesses in staying compliant with employment law through a library of automated employment law documents and a specialized AI database of employment law summaries that captures the law in every jurisdiction.

Explaining the construction of SixFifty’s database, Parker said: “We used something called retrieval augmented generation to instruct the AI to not look at the internet and only look at our database of employment law information to answer questions from our customers. And the results have been magical—the accuracy rate is the highest in the industry.”

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