According to the American Bar Association, the use of generative artificial intelligence in the legal profession nationwide has more than doubled over the past year, with attorneys reporting that they integrate generative AI into daily tasks including drafting correspondence, conducting legal research and summarizing documents. A recent Bloomberg Law survey similarly found that every law firm in the U.S. with at least 500 attorneys — that detailed their technology usage to Bloomberg Law’s Leading Law Firms survey — reported using legal-specific AI tools.
In an email statement to The Cavalier Daily, University School of Law Dean Leslie Kendrick wrote that as she travels the country to meet with alumni and firm leaders, there are two key takeaways that have stood out. First, she noted new lawyers need to know how to use AI effectively, and second, these lawyers will still need to have traditional critical thinking skills. According to Kendrick, AI will make “high-quality lawyering even more important.”
“This means we have to teach both the new and the traditional,” Kendrick wrote. “We have to bring AI into some parts of the curriculum and keep it out of others. … And we will also continue to have Socratic dialogue with students and to expect them to speak, reason and write on their own two feet.”
Kendrick wrote that she hopes the University will continue delivering a top tier experience for its students. For professors, she outlined the importance of seeking a teaching balance of both being able to integrate and use large language models, while also speaking with students face-to-face.
Similar to finding a balance in teaching style, Kendrick wrote that in the legal field, lawyers and clients cannot completely rely on AI. She noted the lawyer — not AI — will ultimately be responsible for the work produced.
“It is the lawyer’s job to communicate well with the client, to see the angles that AI will miss, and ultimately to give good and trustworthy counsel,” Kendrick wrote. “Technology can help with that, but it can’t substitute for it.”
School of Law Professor George Geis, who teaches contracts and transactional law, said that there is not one clear answer for how AI will affect law. In the future, Geis noted that technology’s impact will vary depending on the specific type of law.
“I would guess that the way some of this technology is going to affect litigation is probably going to be different than the way it affects transactional law,” Geis said. “It might be a little bit difficult to generalize across the entire field."
Within the transactional law space, Geis has considered how to integrate technology to better prepare students through a new program called the Deal Lab, scheduled to launch in the Spring 2027 semester. Through this lab, students will be provided with simulated transactional experiences while introducing them to the types of AI tools increasingly being adopted by law firms. Geis said this initiative is similar to a “flight simulator,” allowing students to practice negotiating transactions before entering legal practice.
According to Geis, he is currently working on building the fact patterns and configuring commercially available AI models with custom instructions, legal context and personality types for educational simulations. Fact patterns are a narrative summary of events — real or hypothetical — which students decipher to analyze liability. Geis said that he hopes he can create an environment that uses emerging technology to enhance learning.
"The goal is twofold — one, give students a learning environment where they can work with some of the cutting-edge technology to learn more about the specifics of what's involved in negotiating, and to practice doing some of these semi-real transactions,” Geis said. "Secondly, get students some familiarity in actually working with the type of technology that they might be soon working with on the law firm side."
Similarly, Law Professor Quinn Curtis is offering a new course this fall called AI and Legal Tools Lab. While students are not expected to have any technical background, the aim of the course is for students to find pieces of real legal workflows that could be prone to AI enhancement and learn to create tools that could either partially or completely automate these tasks.
According to Holland Edmonds, rising third-year Law and Darden student, law students are already beginning to face changes outside of school and in the workplace. Edmonds said that she and other summer associates recently completed an orientation at Harvey, an AI platform built exclusively for the legal and professional services. Powered by LLMs, Harvey is used to automate tasks such as legal research, contract analysis, document drafting and reviewing large volumes of legal documents.
During this training, attorneys demonstrated how the technology can assist with legal research and document review while emphasizing the importance of using internal AI systems that protect confidential client information rather than other large language models out there like Claude or ChatGPT.
Edmonds pointed to a conversation she had with a partner to highlight that as firms continue adopting AI, technology may reshape the work traditionally performed by junior associates.
“[A partner was saying to me] that transition from junior associate to mid-level associates — where historically you started to oversee the junior associates — that's almost going to collapse, because as a junior associate, you're pretty much going to be reviewing the work of AI,” Edmonds said.
According to Survey Research Associates, this new legal career trajectory can be described as a “compressed pyramid,” in which firms hire fewer junior attorneys while expecting them to take on more advanced responsibilities earlier in their careers.
Despite the possibility of this compressed pyramid, Edmonds said that the attorneys she has spoken with do not expect AI to eliminate legal work altogether. Instead, she said many conversations have focused on how the role of junior associates may evolve while preserving pathways for professional development.
"The problem that I think all lawyers realize is that you [need] to have entry-level positions,” Edmonds said. “How is the junior associate role going to shift, and how are they going to adjust hiring while also understanding that ... you need experience to become a full-blown attorney?"
David Lowance, School of Law senior assistant dean for career development, said that there are no statistics yet to explain if AI is having an impact on employment out of law school. According to Lowance, there is roughly a one-year lag in employment statistics because the School of Law published results of employment outcomes for the class of 2025 April 30, close to the graduation date of the class of 2026. There was not any notable change in the University Law employment rate between the Class of 2025 when compared to the classes of 2024 and 2023.
"Anecdotally, what we’re seeing in terms of demand during the [recruitment] cycle, [the School of Law is] not seeing a really big contraction in demand because of the adoption of AI” Lowance said. “We think there are other things happening in the market that are probably more impactful at least in the short term."
Lowance said that people thinking about law school should not worry that legal jobs are going away, but rather just consider that they are changing. According to Lowance, skills that the University cultivates will remain important, such as a student's “judgement, context and ability to use [AI].”
"[AI] could actually place an emphasis on other skills, like a growth mindset, intellectual curiosity, people skills and client development skills” Lowance said. “[Those] things [are what] law firms have always come to us to try and get out of U.Va. students, [and now] there could actually be even more of a premium on those skills.”
The fundamental goals of legal education still remain largely the same, Edmonds said, despite the changes that AI has created within the legal industry. She noted that learning how to think without AI is integral to the profession.
"You need to learn how to think like a lawyer, rather than use AI to do that for you," Edmonds said. “So then when you are supposed to use AI ... you're doing so in a way that is AI helping you understand rather than AI doing the understanding for you."
Geis agreed, saying that technology should be viewed as an enhancement rather than a replacement.
"Let's imagine a world where it's not ‘AI is going to replace you,’” Geis said. “It's a world where AI is going to be that proverbial bicycle for your mind, where it's going to allow you just to get more leverage and move faster through the range of issues that you've got to learn.”
Lidia Zur Muhlen is a staff writer for the news desk and frequently covers artificial intelligence for The Cavalier Daily. She is a third-year student pursuing an interdisciplinary course of study examining the politics, ethics and economics of emerging technologies.
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