College of Law chief academic officer Lewis Patrick said this led to “widespread panic” and forced legal educators to adapt and develop programs and policies around AI use.

“In the college’s programs, the key ethical considerations around the use of generative AI are in the areas of equity, transparency and accountability. We cannot assume that all students have access to generative AI tools, and therefore, while we will permit its responsible use within curriculum parameters, we will not mandate that it be used,” he said.

“Transparency is addressed by a non-negotiable requirement that use of generative AI in any coursework activity must be disclosed and must be accompanied by a critical reflection on how it was used and how its output was evaluated by the student.

“Accountability centres on each user’s responsibility for what the AI tool has produced. Students are taught the risks around misinformation and hallucination and the need to protect intellectual property and the privacy of personal information.”

In such a tech-heavy age, legal educators must be taking steps to ensure learning remains “authentic and relevant”, added Patrick.

“[Our] approach is to integrate tech, including AI, into the tasks that students are asked to perform in the same ways that tech and AI will be integrated into the legal work that they will perform in practice. For example, when students undertake a property transaction in our PLT program they are trained in and use the PEXA e-conveyancing system that is widely used in practice. We also partner with Josef Legal to take all our PLT students through a series of modules in which they design and create a legal chatbot,” he said.

“We emphasise to our students how much the world of legal practice is changing as a result of AI and encourage them to be adaptable and flexible in their career aspirations. The college’s Centre for Legal Innovation is a unique asset here – making available to students up-to-date information on developments in practice and providing all our students with free access to virtual internships in emerging career pathways such as legal operations professional, legal data analyst and legal knowledge manager.”

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To enhance students’ skills and make sure they are ready to transition into an AI-augmented legal landscape, the college has formed an AI working group to identify potential use cases and explore emerging AI solutions, as well as develop pilots of priority cases for testing and evaluation by staff and students.

“Use cases are informed by developments in legal practice as well as education,” Patrick said.

“Use cases currently in development are legally trained AI tools to assist students to review and improve their work prior to submission to their lecturer, AI to assist the design team in the creation of realistic tasks and scenarios for students to engage with and an AI bot to provide guidance and assistance to students 24/7.”

The college’s Centre for Legal Innovation, Patrick said, has been “enormously helpful in informing and guiding this work” – and College of Law Centre for Legal Innovation executive director Terri Mottershead said that this work is particularly important as new roles emerge within the profession.

“Every role in legal practice is changing or will change. We’re seeing that daily now for lawyers, allied legal professionals, law students and law grads. Some roles, like prompt engineers, will be transient because everyone will eventually acquire that skill. Other roles are expanding to accommodate new AI-related breaches, laws and regulations; for lawyers, practice areas dealing with IP rights, ethics and responsible AI,” she said.

“Everyone, no matter what they do, is now or will fundamentally work differently – that means from input (how we conceive work) to output (the product) with the magic happening in between measured by speed, accuracy, and how we apply the human bit, our experience. The evolution is already underway from thinking about AI in terms of integration (a tool, combining or bolting onto something) versus augmentation (enhancing or extending human capabilities).

“The only way to prepare is to engage, experiment and embrace. Our clients are doing that and our industry will be left behind if we don’t too.”

Embracing this change, Mottershead added, needs to happen both firm or enterprise-wide and on an individual level.

“We’re in the legal business, so risk management has to be the underlying priority for both and especially as that relates to data security, governance and management.

“Firms need to provide clear guidelines and policies, create the environment and opportunity for their staff to engage with the tech safely, and measure if it enhances an output. Legal professionals need to understand the ‘new’ tech language, how the tech works, its limitations, ask lots of questions, experiment with the tech, and determine the use cases, knowing that some will apply across the board and others will be discrete to a practice/business area,” she said.

“The impact of AI on legal practice is one of the largest, systemic changes we have ever seen in our ecosystem. You can’t adapt to change if you don’t engage in it. You don’t know what’s changing if you are not exposed to it. You can’t delegate digital literacy and you won’t ever see the real return on investment in it if you do.”