Jake Karr (NYU) & Jason Schultz (NYU; Google Scholar), The Legal Imitation Game: Generative AI's Incompatibility with Clinical Legal Education, 92 Fordham L. Rev. __ (2024):
Legal practitioners are currently in the midst of a technological maelstrom. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), are taking the legal world by storm, and GenAI evangelists and skeptics are furiously debating the potential impacts of the technology. Will the introduction of GenAI turn lawyers into “prompt engineers”? Will it entirely eliminate the need for human lawyers, at least for certain repetitive legal tasks and work product? Or are we living through yet another Big Tech hype cycle?
Legal educators are engaged in a similar debate. Many in the legal academy—in particular, clinicians and skills instructors who straddle both practice and pedagogy—are asking whether and how they should teach GenAI tools to law students or allow them to use the technology in client or coursework. This is further complicated by the rapid development and deployment of GenAI tools, which have created an atmosphere not only of overwhelming urgency but also of perceived inevitability. Legal educators are left between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, legal employers are racing to embrace GenAI, putting pressure on educators to prepare students for any number of possible AI futures. On the other hand, the technology is novel, uncertain, and risky. Educators must choose between speeding up to incorporate these tools into their curricula without sufficient evidence and reasons to do so or slowing down to thoroughly understand, assess, and test them at the risk of undermining the employability of their students in an unforgiving job market. All the while, technology vendors and platform providers are attempting to integrate GenAI into everything, including legal research, writing, and practice tools, and directly marketing them to students, often with little to no consultation with the legal academy and without an agreed-upon framework for evaluating risk or utility.
So how should those of us in the field of legal education proceed? To answer this question, we must examine the tangible student learning opportunities that we are hoping to create, and evaluate whether and how integrating GenAI into law school curricula might help or hinder those opportunities.
In this paper, we briefly describe aspects of the technology that are particularly relevant to, and raise particular risks for, its potential use by lawyers and law students. We then identify three foundational goals of clinical legal education that provide useful frameworks for evaluating technological tools like GenAI: (1) practice readiness; (2) justice readiness; and (3) client-centered lawyering. While these are by no means the only goals of clinical education, they provide key perspectives and criteria for GenAI assessment. Finally, we examine whether GenAI is pedagogically compatible with each of these three goals. We conclude that GenAI presents only de minimis learning opportunities for practice readiness, and it is largely incompatible with justice readiness and client-centered lawyering, especially when considering the serious concerns that the development, deployment, and use of GenAI raise for those clinical programs with public-interest missions.
