Artificial Intelligence in the Legal Field: Law Students Perspective

TL;DR

This study investigates law students' perspectives on AI, revealing their current engagement levels, opinions, and potential for future integration into legal education and practice, highlighting differences from established law firms.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into law students' AI awareness and attitudes, filling a research gap by focusing on this specific cohort's views and experiences.

Findings

Law students are less engaged with AI than established law firms.

Legal professionals show higher enthusiasm for AI than students.

Collaboration with computer science can enhance students' AI skills.

Abstract

The Artificial Intelligence field, or AI, experienced a renaissance in the last few years across various fields such as law, medicine, and finance. While there are studies outlining the landscape of AI in the legal field as well as surveys of the current AI efforts of law firms, to our knowledge there has not been an investigation of the intersection of law students and AI. Such research is critical to help ensure current law students are positioned to fully exploit this technology as they embark on their legal careers but to also assist existing legal firms to better leverage their AI skillset both operationally and in helping to formulate future legal frameworks for regulating this technology across industries. The study presented in this paper addresses this gap. Through a survey conducted from July 22 to Aug 19, 2024, the study covers the law students background, AI usage, AI applications in the legal field, AI regulations and open-ended comments to share opinions. The results from this study show the uniqueness of law students as a distinct cohort. The results differ from the ones of established law firms especially in AI engagement - established legal professionals are more engaged than law students. Somewhat surprising, the law firm participants show higher enthusiasm about AI than this student cohort. Collaborations with Computer Science departments would further enhance the AI knowledge and experience of law students in AI technologies such as prompt engineering (zero and few shot), chain-of-thought prompting, and language model hallucination management. As future work, we would like to expand the study to include more variables and a larger cohort more evenly distributed across locales. In addition, it would be insightful to repeat the study with the current cohort in one year to track how the students viewpoints evolve.