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AI and Technology in Legal Education
Building the Lawyer of Tomorrow
A generation ago, a law student’s toolkit consisted of casebooks, Westlaw terminals, and a highlighter. Today, the tools are changing faster than most law schools can track—and the most innovative aren’t playing catch-up—they’re leading the charge.
Several of this year’s Excellence in Innovation Award: Law Schools honorees have built programs that place AI and emerging technology at the center of legal education, not as a one-off or elective, but as a core professional competency.
Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law (NSU Law) has built one of the most institutionally comprehensive legal technology programs in the country. At its center is the NSU-NSLT Advanced Legal Technology Certificate, an 18-hour program combining live CLE training with online modules covering generative AI, e-discovery, digital forensics, cybersecurity, and professional responsibility—open to both law students and practicing attorneys. More than 200 attendees participated in the January 2026 CLE alone.
NSU Law embeds technology training from the first day of orientation through upper-level concentrations in IP, Cybersecurity, and Technology, and extends its reach into the community through the annual Sharon & Mitchell W. Berger Entrepreneur Bootcamp, which has equipped more than a thousand small business owners with legal and technology knowledge. Its student-led Nova Law Review symposium on navigating AI brought scholars, practitioners, and judges together around one of the most consequential issues shaping the profession.
Vanderbilt Law School’s AI Law Lab (VAILL), launched in November 2023, describes itself as a hub where innovative minds converge to reimagine the future of law through the lens of AI. Its work spans collaborations with law firms of all sizes to implement ethical AI solutions, CLE sessions and bar association presentations, community events including a Women + AI Summit that has drawn hundreds of scholars and practitioners from around the world, a rigorous AI curriculum for students, and publicly available tools including an AI Governance Bills Tracker and a Generative AI for Legal Services Primer.
VAILL’s democratizing philosophy—that AI knowledge should be accessible to the full legal community, not just those at elite institutions—distinguishes it from more narrowly conceived programs.
Northern Illinois University College of Law found a specific, practical problem to solve: law students preparing for appellate advocacy oral arguments were nervous, underprepared, and had limited access to realistic practice opportunities. The legal writing department’s response was to create Oyez, a custom GPT that allows students to practice with either targeted question prompts or full voice-activated simulations that replicate the experience of arguing before a panel.
Faculty also developed a user guide to help students get the most from the tool before their spring term oral arguments. The results were clear: students were less anxious, performed measurably better, and the overall appellate advocacy program improved. NIU is already planning to use Oyez with incoming first-year students each year going forward.
At Hofstra University’s Maurice A. Deane School of Law, innovation is not just in what technology students are building—it’s who they are building it with. The Deans’ Legal-Tech Fellowship pairs law students and computer science students as equal partners to develop technology-based tools addressing real-world legal challenges.
In its first year, fellows built a multilingual chatbot to guide users through New York State Small Claims Court. In its second year, the Fellowship partnered with Hofstra’s Medical-Legal Partnership to develop a guided interview tool to help users determine Social Security Disability eligibility—incorporating visual prompts and drop-down menus to translate complex medical histories into the Bluebook’s legal framework.
The interdisciplinary model, grounded in real legal needs rather than hypothetical exercises, mirrors exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration that modern legal practice increasingly demands.
Pepperdine Caruso School of Law’s Pepperdine AI Readiness (PAIR) for Lawyering is distinctive for one reason above all others: it brings together not just students and faculty, but also staff, alumni, and employers, in a single coordinated initiative.
Launched in spring 2026, PAIR began with listening: a community-wide survey in which more than 95% of first-year students participated alongside faculty, staff, alumni, and employers. The results shaped three core priorities: an AI credential for students, practical AI workshops for every constituency, and a compass framework—grounded in ethics, justice, compassion, and accuracy—to guide the institution’s ongoing AI decisions.
In a landscape where many law schools are still figuring out what to do about AI, Pepperdine has already built a community-wide infrastructure for doing it thoughtfully.
