Press Release: Learning Law in the AI Age Law School Will Offer More Classes Connected to Artificial Intelligence Than Ever This Year

From governance and ethical concerns to how artificial intelligence can be used in legal practice, the University of Virginia School of Law is offering a broad range of classes this academic year aimed at preparing students for a new era for the profession and society.

With 12 courses available to students, this marks the most classes directly related to AI that the Law School has offered in a single year.

Professor Quinn Curtis, who as associate dean for curricular programs helped plan the addition of AI courses, is teaching a lab class on AI legal tools himself. He said legal education has a responsibility to evolve with the profession.

“Keeping our students on that curve — so they’re developing the traditional skills that lawyers need to have but also skills to navigate this challenging world in a world that’s going to look very different five years from now than it looks today — I think that’s at the core of what a law school should be doing,” he said.

The emergence of AI is already changing many aspects of legal practice, and faculty say lawyers entering the field now will need to be prepared from day one to use AI tools effectively and understand the legal and ethical issues they present.

“It’s understandable to be a bit anxious about what the legal profession will look like in a few years. But our job as professors is to prepare students to help them navigate that,” said Professor Kevin Cope, who is the instructor for two of the upcoming courses and who recently co-authored a series of papers on how AI could change legal education.

He said that new technology is transforming the nature of how lawyers work, especially more junior attorneys. Those who “make AI work in their favor by making them more efficient, better researchers, better legal analysts, better writers, and to become more productive and more effective — those are the ones who will have a strategic advantage in the job market.”

Cope added: “I think it will be an advantage to have had some substantial experience while already in law school, as opposed to just learning as a first-year or second-year associate.”

Professor Celia Bigoness, director of the John W. Glynn Jr. Law & Business Program who joined the faculty this summer, likened the need for innovation with AI training to what was required in higher education during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to accommodate remote teaching.

“I feel like we’re in a similar disruption right now where the practice of law is changing and is using technology in ways that none of us experienced when we were in law school or when we were starting out as junior lawyers,” said Bigoness, who is teaching a course in the fall on how AI can be used to help draft contracts. “So that’s why I think it’s really important for us as educators to meet the legal profession where it is and give our students an advantage when they’re going into the workplace.”

Kenneth Edwards, a lecturer who serves as director of technology and AI at GEICO, is teaching a seminar focused on the responsible deployment of AI systems. Seeing the many dimensions of AI in his daily work, Edwards said he was motivated to offer a seminar that allows students to gain a better understanding of what they will face as attorneys.

“Part of this is wanting to help be a part of that conversation and raising awareness of those issues and saying this isn’t all theoretical — there are practical considerations,” he said.

Edwards said he believed the growing incorporation of AI into legal education reflects the reality of the profession.

“What it’s saying to me is that this is important,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere, and since it’s now part of how we do what we do as lawyers, let’s get some classical training on it.”

Cope said that AI skills are not only an advantage for early-career attorneys, but firms will likely expect associates to know how to use the technology moving forward.

“In the past firms expected that people they hire would be adept at understanding how to use Westlaw or Lexis, how to construct legal arguments and so forth,” he said. “They don’t expect to teach those things, and I think that in the future they will expect junior lawyers who are proficient in interacting with generative AI in productive ways, and in ways that don’t compromise the quality of the work product through hallucinations and other sorts of AI errors.”

In addition to skills training, UVA Law class offerings will emphasize the policy dimensions of AI, governance issues, ethical issues, as well as the risks that can arise if used improperly. “Learning about how the law treats AI” is also an important component, Cope said. For instance, he noted, he’ll be teaching students about tort liability with autonomous vehicles.

As news reports have surfaced in recent years of lawyers carelessly incorporating AI into their work, leading to high-profile errors such as citing nonexistent cases, understanding that technology is not a replacement for a lawyer’s judgment is critical, Edwards said.

“AI can sound very confident, but it can be very wrong. And lawyers, if they don’t do their due diligence and check that output and submit something to a court or put something in a filing, and it’s wrong and it’s made up — it doesn’t exist or is misrepresented — that’s not a good day for that lawyer,” he said.

While AI is already changing legal practice, Edwards said the field remains in a period of discovery, with important issues still to be addressed.

“This is evolving. This is an exciting time to get into this field, but there are still a lot of questions to be answered,” Edwards said.

Bigoness underscored that uncertainty remained about how AI will be used by law firms moving forward, heightening the need for wide-ranging education while students are still in law school.

“We need our students to be adaptable, flexible and curious about integrating these tools into their practices. So we have an opportunity to start right here in the classroom,” she said.

Curtis said that even amid rapid change, the essence of legal practice will remain constant.

“We as a faculty see a need to prepare our students to enter a world where AI is really changing the way that lawyers practice law,” he said. “But it’s also the case that fundamentally what lawyers do for clients hasn’t changed that much. So how we do it is changing, but what lawyers do is staying relatively the same.”

Here are the classes relating to AI that will be offered in 2026-27:

• AI and Employment Law: This fall semester short course from UVA Law lecturer Christopher Wilkinson, a senior counsel and firm-wide co-chair of educational institutions and services at Perkins Coie, examines the emerging technological and legal outlooks for using AI in the workplace.
• AI and Legal Tools Lab: Offered by Curtis, a former Microsoft software engineer, this fall course allows students to work in groups and develop AI tools suited to automating certain real-world legal workflows.
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: A returning course from Professor Thomas Nachbar allows students this fall to learn more about the computer science behind AI and machine learning and how this technology intersects with the law.
• Contract Drafting: Bigoness’ fall course uses AI simulations to teach modern contract drafting and negotiation, while meeting professional responsibility obligations.
• Data Use, AI Ethics and Governance: Taught by Edwards, this seminar covers the legal and ethical frameworks pertaining to responsible deployment and oversight of AI systems, particularly the data that powers them.
• Deal Lab: A new class from Professor George Geis, debuting in the spring, will allow students to gain experience in transactional law through AI-assisted simulations. Geis is harnessing a team of UVA Law students to build the AI agents powering the simulations.
• The Evolving AI Governance Landscape: This returning short course, which will be offered in both the fall and spring semesters and taught by Tom Robertson ’88, a lecturer and senior Microsoft official, examines AI governance debates, particularly the perspectives of key players across the globe.
• Law and Artificial Intelligence: Taught by Cope, this spring course will examine the myriad ways AI is impacting law and society, from algorithm bias to tort liability for self-driving cars.
• LawTech: Scheduled for spring, Professor Michael Livermore, a director of the LawTech Center, will lead students in an examination of new technologies, including AI and machine learning, and the potential upside and downside of increased automation of legal work.
• Privacy in Practice: Building and Leading a Modern Privacy Office: Taught by Kathleen Walters ’99, a lecturer and former IRS chief privacy officer, this spring seminar will look at how privacy, data protection and AI oversight are applied in structure and decision-making in complex public and private sector organizations.
• Seminar in Ethical Values (fall): Offered by Professors Charles Barzun ’05 and Josh Bowers, this seminar examines how profoundly AI is reshaping society — and how deeply those changes should go.
• Seminar in Ethical Values (spring): Professor Mila Versteeg and Cope will explore ethical and legal issues related to the evolving AI landscape, such as AI legal personhood, generative AI attribution in writing and liability for autonomous systems.