Introduction

Shortly after ChatGPT launched in late 2022, I was doing what most of us were doing: testing it, poking at it, trying to figure out what it could and couldn’t do. On a whim, I asked it to write a love poem for my husband. It produced something earnest, rhyming, and profoundly mediocre. I called him into the room. “I wrote you a poem,” I said, and read it aloud with as much feeling as I could muster.

Introduction

Students in legal research and writing often ask two deceptively easy questions: “Where do I start?” and “How do I know when I am done?” Even after learning how to spot issues, select jurisdictions, identify sources of authority, and navigate legal research platforms, many remain uncertain about these questions. They resurface in upper-level research and writing courses, as well as in internships, clerkships, clinics, and jobs.

In the world of legal writing instruction, we’re in a transition not unlike the one agricultural workers faced when they moved from animal-powered to steam-powered farming equipment. In the pre-industrial era, many humans had agricultural jobs that involved significant physical labor. Some built muscles and motor memory naturally as they guided a horse-drawn plow. Then the industrial and technological revolutions arrived.

Large Language Models (LLMs) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made it easier than ever for students to outsource legal research and writing, circumventing the learning process and posing an existential threat to the concept of academic integrity and honesty. Students need only produce a prompt of no more than a few sentences describing their assignment to receive a polished, high-quality piece of work within minutes.

Published: December 2025

1. Introduction

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are changing how we think about writing in nearly every profession, including the legal field. For legal writing professors, this development presents both a challenge and an opportunity: how do we prepare students to write effectively in a world where AI can generate a full draft in seconds?