The No-B.S. AI Law Blog

Hello, legal friends, peers, colleagues, professors—employers?—and enthusiasts alike. I’m Alyssa, a 1L at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the mind behind “The No B.S. AI Law Blog.” This is going to be a long and probably rambling post because—as I hoped to imply with the blog’s title—I am interested in AI, but I don’t have a Bachelor of Science or related degree. Explaining how I got here and what I hope to do with my interest is an important part of this blog, so if you’re interested feel free to read. If not, there will be less personal content soon 😊

When I started my law school journey, I knew very little about artificial intelligence. I was a big Westworld fan (RIP) but, frankly, not the biggest technology fan. Back in the day, I was a ten-year-old who could code her own Myspace (a skill I wish I’d cultivated because the world lost so many years of a woman in STEM—lol), and I loved playing Sims4 on the family desktop. But as the iPhone (after iPhone… after iPhone) was released and technology’s focus shifted toward influencers and follower counts, my interest (and engagement) steadily declined.   

I’m not someone who’s always wanted to go to law school, and as a 29-year-old law student, clearly, my journey here has taken some time. At the risk of trauma dumping, I won’t dive into my entire life story (though perhaps there can be another post about my “non-traditional” background). In any case, law school came only after I’d re-enrolled in my undergraduate program to finish the approx. three semesters’ worth of work I had left of my degree. It was post-pandemic, and I was post-breakup, living in my mom’s very tiny guestroom. Frankly, my mom told me I couldn’t stay with her if I was just going to sulk, and I didn’t fight her on it because 1) I was very muchsulking, 2) I knew what it would mean if I went back to school, finally embarking on the law school journey I’d somewhat manically convinced myself I could do after years of struggling personally and academically, and 3) I knew the only thing holding me back was a fear of failure. So, I listened to my mom and finished the rest of my required coursework online. I was still sulking, but now I could fixate on achieving my goal. Over the next 16 months, I completed my remaining coursework with all As, secured a two-semester virtual internship with the Office of the NJ Attorney General, and worked a restaurant job to ensure I could pay for LSAT study prep materials, a subscription to 7Sage (IYKYK) and basically anything I thought might get me to my law school goal.   

But by the time I graduated in May 2022, I still hadn’t gained an acceptance into law school. My highest LSAT score was 157 (which I knew could maybe get me into some schools but definitely not get me scholarships). I’d applied to two schools just to stay I did—and, as I’d expected, got rejected. Without any other real option, I delayed a cycle, kept working at the restaurant and studying, scored 7 points higher on my LSAT, improved my applications… and by Spring 2023, found myself choosing between a handful of schools, eventually landing on the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in NYC, and enrolling in their “May-start” program.

I chose Cardozo’s unique “May-start” program, which splits the first year into three semesters, to ensure I had the skills and foundation needed to succeed in law school, and the intensive nature of the program quickly exposed me to the tough realities of 1L year. As I dove into my coursework, I quickly realized parsing through dense statutory language and complex case law was just as time-consuming as everyone warned me it’d be. I spent hours meticulously evaluating intricate sentence structures, trying to extract the core case principles and arguments. I loved highlighting—every part of every sentence had a color to distinguish the people and places and things and laws, words I didn’t understand, and Latin terms that didn’t actually matter—so my online PDF textbooks looked more like coloring pages than legal dicta. While I began to recognize linguistic patterns, it would take me so long to read that my eyes would lose focus, and I was forced to stare at the ceiling and simply wonder if I was cut out for law school at all.

I first used AI in law school for a pretty low-stakes oral argument in our summer semester Criminal Law course. It was “low stakes” in that it didn’t make up much of our grade, and I think our Professor only assigned it to get us less rigid about being in our first semester, but of course, we still tackled it with utmost seriousness—I even wore a blazer and dress pants the day of. By extension, this meant I was seriously overthinking and didn’t really know how to prepare best. So, I literally Googled “Chat GPT” and–without seeking out directions or exploring the chat’s functions—input my team’s prosecutorial argument alongside prompts like “What follow-up questions might my Criminal Law professor have in response to this argument?” and “How might defense counsel try to undermine my argument?”

The responses were impressive, but I was really convinced the program might be worth utilizing when 1) we got our opposing counsel’s argument, within it many of the responses provided by Chat GPT, and 2) some of our professor’s follow-up questions even mimicked the chatbot.

Still, at the time, my thoughts were minimal. Nothing drastically changed about the way I processed law schoolwork. I still had a ton of reading to do. Chat GPT was just okay.

My summer semester came and went, and I performed slightly above average but not nearly as highly as I’d hoped. I was still exhausted from reading to the point where I considered going to an optometrist (because surely this eye strain was NOT normal). Readings were still just as time-consuming as when I’d started, but now, with an additional legal writing course, I felt especially self-conscious about all of my law student abilities. I’ve always been a “writer” in that I liked to write (duh), but legal writing is not fun writing and, for the first time ever, required me to critically assess my writing for passive voice issues, correct citations, and a new legal structure I couldn’t quite grasp. Being good at legal writing requires you to be good not only at writing but also at reading and comprehension, and I wondered how I got by for so long without realizing how poorly I was at all three.

My legal writing class took place every Tuesday at 6 pm. It was my least convenient class, the latest on my longest day, and also my smallest, with 8 of us during the fall semester and 7 in the spring after one of the students switched out due to “scheduling conflicts.” Usually, the class struggled to engage during what was most of our ninth or tenth hour on campus, and because the legal writing course wasn’t standardized across sections, our understanding of what was required of us differed drastically, often based on what we could learn on our own outside of class time—to note, this was by no means a result of our professor,  because she made legal writing concepts straightforward and practical, despite our necessary benchmarks being much less so. Students were confused, and frustrations ran high. I usually received the same feedback on my legal writing assignments: I wrote passively and needed to improve by using active language. But legal writing felt like a game of two steps forward and three steps back, and I still managed to tread slightly behind no matter how many steps I took in either direction.

For the sake of all the moving parts to this story and law school and life, I’d like to take a step back and say this: 1L (and law school and life) is hard for so many reasons, one of the biggest being that while we are off trying to chase our dreams and success it usually comes at the price of missing our people. I miss SO many people (Khawla, Rowan, Vaishalie, Tor, Lillian, the husbands, Izzy, my sisters, my family), but especially Dr. Sandy Dawoud, who has, perhaps more blindly than she should’ve sometimes, supported me through more or less any and all the things I’ve wanted to do (and pushed me toward the things I didn’t want to do but needed to do). Sandy picked up my defeated post-LSAT score release phone call, let me cry on the phone, and told me to get it together because there was no world where I wasn’t getting into law school. When we pledged our sorority, Sandy bluntly informed our elder sisters she wouldn’t sacrifice grades for silly recruitment events. We have been soul sisters ever since.

On a random weekday during my fall semester, Sandy texted me, probably to ask me if I was free (even though the answer was most often no). We caught up briefly, as we always do, and I received several voice memos from Sandy, as she always sends. In response to a standard “surviving, not thriving” complaint about law school, Sandy sent a message asking if I’d started to use AI in my work. “I’ve played around with it,” I told her. In classic Sandy fashion, she spilled all the details on Claude, her AI platform of choice—how helpful it was in researching for her doctoral thesis and how efficiently it streamlined work of all sorts. She explained how she prompted Claude with file attachments to feed the platform information. Hearing Sandy describe how helpful the tool had been for her, I wondered if I could use Claude the same way for law school. Admittedly, it felt like adding another layer of work.

In a way, utilizing AI is adding another layer of work. I started by using AI to check my writing for passive voice. I then started importing cases into the platform and asking it how I could use the case decision to support my own argument or disprove an opponent’s argument. I still needed to double-check the work and provide my own edits, but I was able to not only streamline my ability to understand and comprehend legal materials but also properly process information by ensuring anything I did not understand was elaborated on until it couldn’t be—I could ask AI all the questions until I was confident enough to tackle the challenge on my own.

This is where the No-B.S. AI Law Blog comes in. As a law student navigating the complex world of legal education and the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, I want to share my honest, unfiltered experiences with AI tools in the context of law school and beyond. But more than that, I want to use this platform to explore my growing interest in pursuing a legal career dedicated to the fascinating intersection of law and artificial intelligence.

Through this blog, I aim to provide a candid look at the realities of integrating AI into legal studies and practice, cutting through the hype and misconceptions to get to the heart of what these technologies can (and can’t) do for us as legal students and professionals. I’ll share my journey as I delve deeper into the legal and ethical implications of AI, positioning myself as a knowledgeable and forward-thinking law student committed to empowering others to embrace the responsible development and deployment of these technologies in the legal field.

Together, we’ll explore the practical applications of AI in law school and legal practice, sharing tips, tricks, and lessons learned along the way. We’ll dive into the ethical considerations surrounding the use of AI in law and examine how we can harness these tools responsibly to enhance our work and better serve our clients. We’ll also discuss the exciting career opportunities that are emerging at the intersection of law and AI, charting a course for aspiring legal professionals like myself who want to make their mark in this dynamic and rapidly evolving field.

By fostering an open, no-holds-barred dialogue about AI in law, we can work towards demystifying these technologies and empowering legal professionals to make informed decisions about their use. The No-B.S. AI Law Blog is here to serve as a platform for this critical conversation, providing a space for us to share our successes, failures, and everything in between as we navigate this brave new world together.

So, join me on this journey as we explore the gritty, sometimes messy, but always fascinating reality of AI in law. Together, we can separate fact from fiction, confront the challenges head-on, and discover how these powerful tools can transform the way we learn, practice, and innovate in the legal field. Along the way, we’ll chart a course for a rewarding and impactful career at the cutting edge of law and technology. Welcome to the No-B.S. AI Law Blog—let’s get real about AI in law and build the future of the profession together.