GenAI for Legal Researchers: Accelerating Case Analysis

By the 2030s, bold predictions suggest that AI will get incredibly close to matching or exceeding human cognition, completely changing the very concept of legal expertise and services. (See: The Times article Prof. Richard Susskind) Lawyers and legal professionals can choose to wait for that revolution or be part of the conversation and shape the development of these systems today. In the near term, GenAI tools, powered by large language models (LLMs), will continue to revolutionize legal research and analysis, enabling faster insights and more efficient workflows.

While GenAI is a powerful tool, it is not a replacement for human expertise. This course will show how to use GenAI as a strategic tool to complement and enhance human skills in legal analysis.

In this course, we will challenge you to think of GenAI as a strategic partner in your research and analysis. Not as a magical tool that solves all problems on its own. We will explore how to guide it to be your powerful legal assistant that enhances and augments human analytical effort and expertise. We will see how human-supervised GenAI tasks can help us capitalize on the unique strengths that GenAI presents while accommodating its current limitations. We will focus on analysis and parsing of lengthy statutes and regulatory sections. We will use ChatGPT and Claude – the two most widely available GenAI tools - to establish foundational skills and best practices that you can continue to build upon as you engage with these evolving and innovative technologies. Additionally, we will see how human supervision of GenAI can help accelerate drafting and enable quality assurance checks for human-created draft content.

By the end of this course, you will have a much deeper intuition of GenAI and be able to engage with it more meaningfully to help accelerate your research and analysis.