The legal profession is being transformed. Northwestern Pritzker Law is shaping what comes next.
Technology has always changed the practice of law. New tools reshape how lawyers find and analyze information, communicate with clients, build businesses, resolve disputes, and serve institutions. While the technologies will continually change, the responsibility of legal education does not. Therefore, law schools must prepare lawyers to understand new systems, assess their capabilities and limitations, and exercise sound judgment about when and how to use them.
Artificial intelligence has brought that responsibility into sharper focus. AI now touches legal research and drafting, litigation and discovery, regulatory analysis, client service, and the work of courts. Yet many of the systems that will shape the careers of today’s law students do not exist yet. Preparing students for a profession being remade by AI therefore requires more than teaching them to master today’s platforms. It requires educating lawyers who can adapt as technology changes without relinquishing the analytical rigor, ethical responsibility, and professional judgment that give legal expertise its value.
“Technology has always changed the way lawyers work, and legal education has to evolve with the profession,” says Northwestern Pritzker Law Dean Zachary D. Clopton. “What distinguishes this moment is the speed and reach of artificial intelligence. Our responsibility is not simply to teach students how to use the tools that exist today, but to give them the intellectual foundation, judgment, and adaptability to navigate technological change throughout their careers.”
Northwestern Pritzker Law enters this moment from a position of strength. Long before generative AI began reshaping legal education and practice, the school was building the interdisciplinary culture, curriculum, and connections to technology, business, and engineering that have become essential to preparing lawyers for an AI-enabled profession. AI has not prompted a new educational philosophy — it has brought new urgency to an approach the Law School has long embraced, and created an opportunity to lead how legal education evolves alongside the profession.
Northwestern Pritzker Law built its interdisciplinary focus well before the AI boom. In 2015, then-Pritzker Law Dean Daniel Rodriguez and McCormick School of Engineering Dean Julio Ottino launched a series of “Bridges” conferences centered on the Law-STEM alliance as a catalyst for innovation. A year later, they called nationally for “a dynamic partnership between law and engineering, a constant dialogue” about both the application of law to new technology and the impact of new technology on law.
Northwestern Pritzker Law translated that premise two years later into experiential education. In spring 2017, the Law School launched the Innovation Lab to help JD, JD-MBA, LLM, and MSL students succeed in a technologically driven global economy. The course paired law students with computer science students from McCormick, and by 2019 interdisciplinary teams were working with judges, legal aid organizations, law firms, corporate legal departments, and technology companies to build and test prototype solutions to real legal problems.
The Law School also developed AI-specific coursework before generative AI entered the public consciousness. Daniel W. Linna Jr., now Director of Law and Technology Initiatives and Professor of Instruction in Law and Computer Science, joined Northwestern Pritzker Law in 2018 and taught Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning that fall. In spring 2019, he added Law of AI and Robotics. He has continued to teach in both areas as AI has moved from a specialized subject to a defining issue for legal practice. Linna and Howard Law Professor April Dawson also co-authored the first casebook on Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning, to be released in fall 2026.
“People would tell me, ‘Why are you doing this technology stuff? This is irrelevant to being a lawyer.’ It turns out it’s not,” Linna says.
Today, AI reaches across the Northwestern Pritzker Law student experience, but the educational philosophy matters more than the number of tools or courses. The progression is deliberate: students learn the law and develop the essential skills of lawyering; they learn what AI systems can and cannot do; they practice with the technology; they evaluate its output; and they remain responsible for the result.
All first-year students receive foundational AI training, and students can use professional-grade legal AI platforms already entering law firms and legal departments, including Harvey, Legora, Westlaw, CoCounsel, and Lexis+ AI Protégé. Advanced courses examine AI through doctrine, governance, litigation, professional responsibility, and legal reasoning. Professor John McGinnis’s Law and Artificial Intelligence: Doctrine, Institutions, and Governance, for example, considers the implications of large language models and agentic AI for contract and tort liability, intellectual property, administrative decision-making, and corporate governance.
Communication and Legal Reasoning, the year-long foundational course required of first-year students, puts the school’s philosophy into practice. Students first learn and practice a core analytical or writing skill and assess their own work. They then introduce generative AI and ask whether the technology made the work faster, better, or neither. The sequence rests on a straightforward principle: students cannot meaningfully supervise AI output until they know enough to recognize strong legal work — and to identify when polished language masks weak reasoning.
Michelle Falkoff, Associate Dean of Legal Writing and Instruction, makes that tension concrete in the classroom. Her students have asked AI to revise deliberately flawed legal writing and then examined the result. The technology can improve tone and polish and sometimes identify substantive problems. It can also produce fluent prose that obscures shallow analysis or inaccurate content.
“You always have to check what it does. And then you have to decide if this is how you want to present yourself to the world, because you’re always the one who’s responsible for your writing. No matter what tools you use, that voice has to be yours,” Falkoff says.
Professor of Practice Wendy Muchman brings decades of experience in legal ethics and professional responsibility to the questions AI now raises for lawyers. She served on the American Bar Association committee that authored Formal Opinion 512, the ABA’s landmark 2024 guidance on lawyers’ professional obligations when using generative AI.
Pedagogically, Muchman brings issues of professional responsibility into the classroom through practical exercises that require students to evaluate AI through the lens of lawyers’ ethical obligations. Students consider how AI affects duties involving competence, confidentiality, communication, conflicts, and fees. In one exercise, students develop a conflict waiver using either traditional resources or an AI tool, then compare the results and examine what lawyers must know to recognize when AI-generated work falls short.
“We want the class to develop students’ legal analysis, research, and communication skills. The tools can interfere with their ability to learn those skills if they use them before they’re ready,” says Muchman.
The goal is not to shield students from technology. It is to ensure that technology extends expertise rather than short-circuits its development. AI may change the workflow, but it does not transfer the lawyer’s professional obligations to the machine.
The Donald Pritzker Entrepreneurship Law Center takes a different approach to the same idea. One of the first programs in the country to provide intensive transactional training for law students, the DPELC gives students the opportunity to counsel real entrepreneurs and startups — building the client relationships, business judgment, and transactional fluency that practice demands. Faculty have extended that learning environment by introducing AI-powered client simulations, giving students more opportunities to build and practice the interpersonal skills that no classroom exercise alone can fully develop.
In the Innovation Lab, the classroom becomes a development environment. Co-taught by Linna and Kris Hammond, Bill and Cathy Osborn Professor of Computer Science at McCormick, the course asks interdisciplinary teams of law and computer science students to define problems, build and test prototypes, and refine solutions alongside external partners throughout the semester.
Recent collaborations show both the promise and the complexity of AI in law. One team developed an AI tool to help federal district court judges review Social Security disability appeals effectively and efficiently. Another worked with the American Arbitration Association on an AI-based mediation coach for self-represented parties. Linna has also developed a moot court simulation tool that analyzes briefs, generates questions, and simulates a hearing, designed to deepen preparation and judgment.
“The big problems in the world are interdisciplinary. There are huge opportunities for AI to improve access to law, to improve courts, to improve rule of law and democracy. There are also risks in the way we introduce AI into law, and this cannot be accomplished with lawyers alone,” Linna says.
For students in the course, the work can sharpen legal reasoning as much as technological fluency. In collaboration with her team, student Ana Carvalho worked on a Thomson Reuters project that developed a framework for evaluating the legal reasoning of large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Her team had to translate an intuitive question — What makes a legal answer good? — into testable criteria that included correctness, completeness, issue coverage, citation validity, and appropriate expressions of uncertainty.
“In law, an answer can sound persuasive and still be wrong, or incomplete, or poorly supported. Those errors can carry real consequences,” Carvalho says.
The exercise changed the way Carvalho approached her own analysis. “In law school, you learn how to spot issues and argue,” she added. “But this project is forcing me to operationalize that instinct into something that I can score consistently.” Her experience illustrates a broader possibility: asking students to evaluate machine reasoning can require them to articulate, with greater precision, what sound legal reasoning demands.
While interdisciplinary learning can introduce different perspectives into the classroom, Northwestern Pritzker Law’s West Coast Initiative takes another step, immersing students in the industries and markets where technological change is unfolding. That proximity has become especially valuable as artificial intelligence reshapes not only legal practice, but also the businesses and industries lawyers advise.
Emerson H. Tiller, J. Landis Martin Professor of Law & Business and Director of the West Coast Initiative, has played a central role in designing that model. Students study an industry and the role law plays within it, then gain firsthand experience working inside the legal departments of companies operating in that environment.
The San Francisco Immersion Program puts that idea into practice in the Bay Area’s technology and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Students spend a semester combining specialized coursework with externships at technology companies, startups, and other businesses. Past placements have included OpenAI, Rivian, eBay, Stripe, FlexAI, Groq, and companies across biotechnology, fintech, software, and other sectors. The experience allows students to move between the classroom and the workplace, connecting legal concepts with the business decisions, technologies, and emerging problems they encounter inside organizations.
As AI has become more important to the technology sector, the San Francisco curriculum has expanded to include courses such as Assessing AI & Computational Technologies and AI Investing & Governance, alongside venture capital, intellectual property strategy, privacy, and other subjects closely connected to technology businesses and startups.
This ability to pair legal education with sustained immersion in distinct professional ecosystems is a distinctive strength for Northwestern Pritzker Law. Students are not simply studying how technology affects established legal rules. They are observing how lawyers operate when technologies and business practices are moving quickly, legal expectations are still taking shape, and organizations must make decisions before every issue has a settled answer.
As Tiller puts it: “Northwestern leans on the side of giving students more access and opportunities to use AI rather than being more restrictive.”
Northwestern Pritzker Law faculty are also at the forefront of research on AI and the legal system, studying how these technologies affect courts, professional standards, and scholarly inquiry, and using them to pursue questions that were previously out of reach.
Linna recently led the first study of judicial AI use based on a random sample of federal judges. More than 60 percent of responding judges reported using at least one AI tool in their judicial work, while training and clear policies remained limited. A McCormick computer science professor, a McCormick student, a Northwestern Pritzker Law student, and a sitting U.S. district judge joined Linna as co-authors, bringing law, technology, and judicial practice to bear on a question already reshaping how courts operate.
Emily Kadens, Edna B. and Ednyfed H. Williams Memorial Professor and Vice Dean, illustrates a different possibility. Her earlier AI-assisted transcription work produced Egerton, a machine-learning model designed to decipher English secretary hand in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century legal records. Her current GATHRLab project addresses the next research challenge: how to structure, retrieve, and analyze enormous collections once researchers can digitize them at scale.
Professor David Schwartz is bringing an empirical lens to one of the most consequential questions about AI and the legal system: how accurately can AI predict the outcomes of federal appellate cases? In ongoing research, Schwartz and his collaborators provide AI models with the briefs and records from pending federal appeals, then ask the models to predict outcomes and assess their own confidence. Preliminary findings suggest the models are reasonably accurate and notably good at identifying when their predictions are likely to be right or wrong. Schwartz argues the findings reframe the debate: rather than asking whether AI should replace judges, the more productive question is where AI performs well, where it falls short, and in what contexts it might assist human decision-makers.
As AI becomes more capable of performing work once done exclusively by lawyers, the human dimensions of legal practice take on greater significance. Lawyers still must build trust, understand the people they serve, navigate complex relationships, adapt to unforeseen circumstances, exercise judgment, and take responsibility for the decisions they make. Those capacities remain fundamentally human. Legal education must prepare students not only to work with new technologies, but to develop the professional identity and interpersonal skills they will carry into relationships with clients, colleagues, courts, and communities.
At Northwestern Pritzker Law, that development begins well before students enter practice. Associate Dean and Dean of Students Susie Spies Roth has expanded the Law School’s focus on professional conduct and communication across the student experience. This begins in orientation, when students explore expectations around professional behavior and dialogue across differences. Those conversations continue through student leadership programs, career preparation, and clinical training, where students begin to navigate professional relationships while representing clients and working alongside practicing lawyers. In the Bluhm Legal Clinic, students take on real cases with faculty guidance, developing the judgment, accountability, and client relationships that define professional practice and that no AI tool can replicate.
Spies Roth also encourages students to understand that professional identity does not begin at graduation. The habits they develop in law school — how they prepare, communicate, navigate disagreement, work with others, and respond when circumstances become difficult — begin to establish the kind of professionals they will become. As technology changes the work lawyers perform, those qualities may become an even more important source of distinction.
“As AI changes the work lawyers do, we have to be just as intentional about developing the qualities students bring to that work as people,” Spies Roth says. “The ability to listen, communicate, understand another person’s perspective, employ empathy, build trust, and adapt to an unexpected situation will continue to matter. Those qualities shape not only how effectively someone practices law, but the kind of lawyer they become.”
Northwestern Pritzker Law’s place within Northwestern University gives its focus on AI unusual breadth. McCormick contributes expertise in computer science and engineering; the Kellogg School of Management brings deep knowledge of business, management, entrepreneurship, and organizational change. Joint programs and certificates connect legal education to those disciplines, while the Master of Science in Law brings STEM professionals into the legal classroom.
Faculty including Linna and Dave Schwartz participate in Northwestern University’s Network for Collaborative Intelligence, which connects researchers across disciplines around responsible, high-impact AI research and education. Northwestern Pritzker Law also convenes practitioners and scholars across fields. Its “AI and the Business of Law” conference brought together lawyers, technologists, and business leaders, including faculty from the Law School, McCormick, and Kellogg, as well as Northwestern Pritzker Law alumnus Che Chang, general counsel of OpenAI.
Northwestern Pritzker Law’s investments in technology and interdisciplinary education position it well for continued growth as AI transforms the profession. The school will continue to evolve its curriculum, create new opportunities for students and faculty to engage with emerging technologies, deepen partnerships across Northwestern University, and convene scholars and practitioners to help define how AI should be used in law.
That work is already taking shape. In spring 2027, Linna will teach a doctrinal version of Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning to as many as 70 students, including first-year students as an elective, expanding access to a subject he first began teaching at the Law School in 2018. The school will also continue to convene the scholars and practitioners shaping this emerging field. The Law and Technology Initiative recently hosted the inaugural AI for Law Scholars Conference, and in March 2027, the school will host the sixth ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law, an international gathering that brings together legal and technical scholars working at the intersection of the two disciplines.
These and other forthcoming efforts reflect a larger ambition: to build on Northwestern Pritzker Law’s strengths in interdisciplinary education, experiential learning, scholarship, and engagement with the profession while investing in the people, programs, and partnerships that will shape the role of AI in law and legal education for years to come.
“AI will continue to change, and so will the questions it raises for lawyers and legal institutions,” Clopton says. “Our opportunity is to build on the strengths that brought us to this moment — bringing disciplines together, creating new ways for students to learn, supporting faculty whose work is shaping the field, and engaging with the profession as it evolves. Our responsibility now is to help lead what comes next.”
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