UC Berkeley Law School’s stricter AI policy forbids students from using it for things like brainstorming, but a professor who helped write the new rules says the school doesn’t want to outright ban the tech.
“Our policy is about developing students with the fundamental skills required for AI lawyering,” UC Berkeley Law School professor Chris Hoofnagle told Business Insider.
Hoofnagle said the school recognized that its 2023 AI use policy was “too liberal” in allowing students to use AI, especially given advancements in generative AI models since then.
“It can, in effect, write a research paper soup to nuts,” Hoofnagle said. “So, the increasing capability of LLMs required us to rethink students’ reliance on them.”
UC Berkeley Law School’s new policy, which will go into effect this summer, does not allow students to use AI for conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, editing, translating, or for any purpose in an exam situation. The 2023 policy allowed for AI use for brainstorming, such as asking a chatbot to help come up with a paper topic, and conceptualization.
Hoofnagle said the new policy was approved by a faculty vote, though instructors can deviate from it. He also said particular AI-focused courses will follow different standards.
The goal, Hoofnagle said, is to ensure that first-year law students are learning the fundamentals of being a lawyer, including “how to read a case, analyze a case, and write about it cogently.”
“Of course, the question becomes, what is the value add of the lawyer?” he said. “And if that lawyer cannot use their own analytical judgment to assess an AI output, that lawyer has very little value. And so, this is what our policy is about.”
Overall, Hoofnagle said the expectation and demand from law firms is that students graduate with a proficiency in using AI.
“Students are asking for these courses, and they’re learning during their summers that law firms already extensively use AI,” he said.
Startups like Harvey and Legora are fiercely competing for the estimated $1 trillion global legal market. Harvey has sought to expand its presence by offering free access to law schools. Stanford Law School, which Hoofnagle said had a stricter AI policy when Berkeley rolled out its initial one in 2023, is part of Harvey’s law school alliance program.
Hoofnagle concedes the policy has loopholes. After all, policing AI is becoming a Sisyphean task in a world where search engines are adding AI overlays to ensure their continued relevance. He said that even standard searches on Lexis and Westlaw now have an LLM-generated summary.
“There is no kind of clean answer for it,” he said, adding, the school “obviously can’t ban search.”
Schools are trying to keep up
Law schools and undergraduate universities are alike in trying to stay ahead of the wave of AI advancements and the challenges that accompany them.
Princeton recently announced the most significant change to its honor code in 133 years, The Daily Princetonian reported. As of July 1, all in-person examinations will be proctored. The advent of AI was cited as one of the reasons for the change.
Hoofnagle said that Berkeley law has seen an “uptick” in misconduct cases and has converted more take-home exams to in-person as a result. The in-person exams are conducted on a computer with specialized software that prevents access to the internet and the use of copy-and-paste functions. Despite the precautions, he said it is still possible to cheat.
“You can’t protect against everything in the world, but there’s a really strong signal that if you cut corners, ultimately the student will pay for it when they have to take an in-person exam,” he said.
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