Legal education, Employability and Artificial Intelligence

Description

Since Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools like Chat GTP, Bard and DALL-E were launched in 2023, the level of discussion on the future of academia, students, employability, and the world has increased dramatically.

Many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) across the globe appeared to have been taken by surprise by the emergence of ChatGTP at the start of 2023, and by speed and enthusiasm with which students got on board with the technology. Across the world, the summer of 2023 saw the start of an continuing move to amend and revise existing academic frameworks to make them suitable for an AI-empowered student body.

The range of views demonstrated by academics is varied. For some, we are doomed. They believe that student integrity is now a thing of the past, and that students will all use Generative AI to complete their coursework, their application letters and every other aspect of their work. This, in turn, will render the work of academics moot, and lead to an inevitable failure in Higher Education Institutions across the globe. Other academics see the opportunity to revise and refine academic programmes to embrace the technology. They regard Generative AI not as a new threat, or indeed as a threat at all, but as the next step in a continual evolution of society’s desire and ability to access near boundless amounts of information at the click of a button.

These extremes, and the more moderate views between them, will shape how individual HEIs and how the sector as a whole moves over the next few years. Will assessments revert to the traditional closed-book memory tests of the past, or will we play to our undeniable strengths and design novel, yet rigorous, assessments which embrace AI?

To answer this question, this paper looks at what legal businesses are doing in relation to the technology. After all, these are the firms who will be employing our graduates, and employability is as much of a theme in 21st century academic as rigour. It is immediately apparent that many legal businesses are embracing the use of GenAI as a tool to write reports, carry our research, and free the time of employees for different tasks. Other companies (which will require our graduates to give them legal advice) are starting to use GenAI to produce advertising strategies, generate innovative building designs, and so on. The use of GenAI in the business world has become as ubiquitous as the use of the Internet.

This paper, which is part of a wider project looking at GenAI and Employability, focuses on how law schools can work to future-proof graduate employability by identifying and embracing the appropriate and ethical uses of GenAI in learning, teaching and assessment.

Period	1 May 2024
Event title	Kuwait International Law School Annual Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Kuwait City, KuwaitShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International