Question From A Law Student: Is Legal Education Preparing Students For An AI-Driven Profession?

A few weeks ago, Trilegal invited applications for its Legal Tech team, seeking people who had built solutions involving legal technology, automation, AI, compliance, contracts, and workflows. Around the same time, Trilegal partner Rahul Matthan reflected on how AI had enabled him, despite not knowing how to code, to create applications that would once have required significant technical expertise. Together, these developments point to a profession that is changing rapidly.

As a law student, these developments left me with a question.

If the legal profession increasingly values technological fluency, automation, and problem-solving, why does legal education continue to focus so heavily on information retrieval and reproduction?

This is not a criticism of doctrinal learning. Foundational subjects remain indispensable. The question is whether they are sufficient for the profession students are preparing to enter.

The legal profession is already changing. AI tools can summarise judgments, organise research, identify issues, generate first drafts of contracts, and assist with due diligence. Several leading Indian law firms have reportedly begun integrating AI tools like Harvey into their workflows, while legal-tech teams are becoming increasingly important within modern practice.

Some institutions, including NLSIU Bengaluru, Jindal Global Law School, and NLU Tripura, have established centres focused on AI and legal technology. But if AI is important enough to justify dedicated centres and institutional investment, should it still remain peripheral to the core law school experience?

Success in law school is often measured through examinations that reward memory, structured reproduction, and doctrinal understanding. Outside the classroom, however, students are repeatedly told that employers value drafting skills, commercial awareness, technological competence, communication, adaptability, and practical problem-solving. The result is that many students find themselves navigating two parallel systems creating a hypothetically paradoxical situation: one that rewards academic performance and another that rewards professional readiness.

The disconnect becomes more apparent when viewed through the lens of technology.

If AI can increasingly assist with legal research and information retrieval, what becomes the unique value of legal education? Surely the answer cannot simply be more information. Information is now more accessible than at any point in history.

Perhaps the skills that will matter most are those that technology cannot easily replicate: judgment, client counselling, advocacy, negotiation, ethical decision-making, strategic thinking, and the ability to evaluate whether an AI-generated answer is reliable in the first place. In other words, the future value of lawyers may lie less in finding information and more in interpreting, applying, questioning, and communicating it.

The challenge is not merely learning how to use AI but understanding its limitations. Lawyers will increasingly need to verify AI-generated outputs, recognise errors and bias, protect confidentiality, and exercise professional judgment. These are professional competencies, not merely technical skills.

This raises a larger question for the profession.

Should law schools continue to prioritise the same skills they have traditionally rewarded, or should they place greater emphasis on technological literacy and practical problem-solving? This is a question that deserves responses not only from law students, but also from law school deans, the Bar Council of India, law firm leaders, in-house counsel, legal-tech professionals, and members of the judiciary.

Law schools do not need to reinvent themselves every time a new technology appears. But AI feels different. It is already influencing how lawyers research, draft, organise information, and deliver legal services. 

If future lawyers will work alongside AI rather than without it, should legal education continue to look largely the same as it did before these tools existed?

That, perhaps, is the question the legal profession should be discussing.

'Question From A Law Student' Vertical, steered by Himanshi Hans