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

Last fall, we independently decided to register for new writing classes to challenge ourselves, expand our writing skills, and regain insight into the beginner’s mindset that our 1L students adopt as they learn legal research and writing. We both expected more growth than challenge.

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?

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.