A first-year law student recently told me, “You’ve got to learn the rules in order to break them.” The comment struck me as a smart distillation of what legal writing is all about, and why we teach it the way we do. More than that, it offers a helpful framework students can return to as they move through the course, wrestle with the challenges of legal writing, and begin to develop their own voice as future lawyers.

Have you ever wished that you could more deeply assess the efficacy of a new teaching exercise you developed, an innovative pedagogical method that you tried, or a novel course you taught? Too often, standardized course evaluations do not capture the data necessary to determine the success (or failure) of a pedagogical experiment.

This article offers a potential tool for legal writing professors seeking to quickly orient students to the positive power—and potential peril—of using generative artificial intelligence tools wisely in the practice of law. This article describes a verified, helpful classroom exercise designed to engage students in the critical evaluation of memos or briefs generated by various AI systems. Through this exercise, students quickly grasp pitfalls of the tools, while they also start to understand that different AI products suit different purposes.

I am both a legal writing professor and a language student—I am learning to speak German. In German, some nouns are feminine, some are masculine, and some are neuter. Why? For seemingly no reason at all. This non-explanation is hard for me to accept. First-year law students, too, are learning a new language. In the same way I felt frustration with German gendering, my students felt skepticism, frustration, and doubt in the face of the new norms and expectations I asked them to follow in our first-year legal writing course.