The best LLMs to become future-ready lawyers

Job title of the future: Lawyers leveraging the full potential of generative artificial intelligence

Requirements: True knowledge of the law with original intellectual insight, emotional intelligence, sophisticated legal research and writing, good, old-fashioned effective communication skills, and the ability to harness the power of emerging technology to make legal work more efficient, accurate, and effective.

From fact gathering to research, analysis and drafting, a lawyer’s work today deals with a lot of digital data. And while current generative AI tools have their limitations, those who can work around them and fuse their functions with a lawyer’s expertise, ethical responsibilities, and human judgment stand to gain an edge. There are promising practical case uses for how GenAI is augmenting and assisting lawyers in handling large volumes of data more effectively, reducing human error, and providing advanced analytics for better decision-making. Examples include CoCounsel, an AI assistant that helps review documents and prepare for depositions, as well as Harvey, which provides custom large language models trained on complex tasks and fine-tuned by domain experts.

Indeed, the majority of law firms (74%) are already anticipating AI to have a high or “transformational” impact on their work within the next five years. But whether a firm’s foray into GenAI use is a flop or not will depend on whether it has the talent who are not only familiar with the emerging technology and its potential applications, but also have the foresight to successfully and continuously integrate new technology into its operations and services.

The question for today’s lawyer is thus: how do you become that lawyer? How do you stay in demand and remain relevant in this evolving legal landscape?

The best law schools might have some answers. Each school’s approach may differ, but what unites them is a confidence that their graduate programmes will prepare students today to meet the criteria of the future job posting above.

Boston University School of Law

BU Law’s LLM equips students with rigorous legal skills and real-world insights that technology alone can’t replace. Source: BU Law

Vibhav Mithal is an Artificial Intelligence and IPR lawyer with one of India’s leading Intellectual Property Rights firms, Anand and Anand. He’s contributed to the initial draft of the ‘Responsible AI – Guidelines for Generative AI’ published by NASSCOM, a non-governmental trade association that serves India’s technology industry and to the “Digital Literacy – The Great Divide” report, submitted to the United Nations Global Digital Compact. Mithal serves on the Peer Review Board of the Springer Journal – AI & Ethics too. It’s a prolific CV straddling industry, academia, and non-profit organisations.

When asked whether the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini can replace his legal reasoning and analysis capabilities, the BU Law LLM Scholar and Intellectual Property Law LLM graduate answers in one word: “no.” “A lot of the work in litigation is intuition, requires emotional intelligence to grasp the proceedings in court, and also requires you to quickly process information, and at times, respond on your feet there and then,” he says.

These are skills you hone in a graduate programme of BU Law’s calibre, according to Mithal. It was the IP Workshop that taught him how to identify the key argument, the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Law course that showed him how to write with pithy and succinctness, and the Introduction to American Law course that ingrained in him the importance of incorporating multiple views, in addition to providing an informative overview of the American legal system that continues to aid him in understanding how countries make different choices based on their socio-political context.

To Mithal, the greatest non-classroom experience that shaped him to be the professional he is today was a briefing with a Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court of India. It was a complex patent matter where the Senior Advocate guided an engineer in explaining the technology to a judge. “It taught me that it remains important to simplify complex aspects. One may have achieved expertise in complex areas, but if they cannot simplify the same, a lot gets lost in communication,” he says. “It is a learning that continues to apply as my legal work now expands into the field of Artificial Intelligence.”

Mithal’s experience captures a distinguishing feature of a BU LLM that makes the qualification timeless — the expert blending of theory and practice by preeminent scholars and accomplished practitioners who know the pulse of many industries, legal and otherwise. One of them is Nick Psyhogeos, Lecturer of Intellectual Property at BU Law and former executive at Microsoft. His classes involve trial-and-error experimentation, a journey ill-suited for      machine-led instruction constrained in its knowledge to pre-trained data. Students rotate through various roles – from judge to jury, from plaintiff to defendant, and as law clerks advising their judges or clients. “Our job is to teach students to learn to think like lawyers. Class time is      spent dissecting cases through simulated exercises, learning essential problem-solving, collaboration, and consensus-building skills,” he says. “Skills built over time that can’t merely be transferred to students as digitised answers to a prompt or series of prompts.”

Still, Psyhogeos welcomes the potential of Gen AI to not only improve legal work, but also legal education. “Used responsibly, GAI apps – just like YouTube and online learning courses before them – will serve as complementary tools to accelerate and elevate the learning journey for students and teachers alike,” he says.

Emory University

Emory University is located in Atlanta, the South’s gateway to the world and close to many major Fortune 500 companies. Source: Emory University

Since its founding in 1916, Emory University School of Law has had many proud moments of change and progress, including admitting the first woman to Emory University. That pioneering spirit persists today as the school continues its mission to educate the next generation of leaders and innovators, led by the sharpest minds in the legal field.

Matthew Sag, Emory Law’s Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science, specialises in copyright law and intellectual property. Born in Australia and with practice experience there and in London, he is today a leading US authority on the fair use doctrine in copyright law and its implications for researchers in the fields of text data mining, machine learning and AI. Currently in the works are several theoretical contributions to copyright law in relation to AI and machine learning and a series of empirical papers using text-mining and machine learning tools to study judicial behaviour.

Meanwhile, Professor Kristin Johnson, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, examines the implications of emerging innovative technologies including distributed digital ledger technologies that enable the creation of digital assets and intermediaries and AI technologies that target commercial and consumer financial transactions, transfers, and assessments.

Through the AI.Humanity Initiative, experts like Professor Sag and Johnson, come together with colleagues from the schools of medicine, radiology, ethics, business, and more to shape the AI revolution to better human health, generate economic value, and promote social justice.

“Ultimately, AI.Humanity seeks to realise the full potential of technology to shape the human endeavour. We want technology to help us realise the full potential of human beings, expressing themselves as a community informed by values, in a manner that we actively choose and shape,” says Provost Ravi V. Bellamkonda on the vision for AI.Humanity at Emory.

UC Berkeley

Being close to Silicon Valley provides Berkeley Law students unparalleled access to practitioners dealing with AI-related legal issues in real time. Source: UC Berkeley

Berkeley Law, one of the nation’s premier law schools, offers an LLM that has two programme options and endless customisation. Ideal for foreign lawyers seeking to prepare for global practice, the curriculum builds a strong foundation in the fundamentals of US law while allowing for customisation based on individual interests.

The LLM Executive Track has two to four courses every few weeks with exams immediately following – designed for those who can’t leave professional or personal commitments for an entire standard academic year. The LLM Traditional Track runs from August to May, with a timeline designed to integrate American and international law students at various levels of study.

If you opt for the LLM Traditional Track, you can earn a Law & Technology Certificate. It requires you to complete two core courses, at least five additional units of coursework as listed under the Intellectual Property & Technology Law, a 15 to 20-page research memorandum addressing a compelling issue in law and technology, and participation in activities such as Blockchain & Law @ Berkeley (BLB), Women in Tech Law (WiTL), Legal Automation Workshop, among others.

Choose the LLM Executive Track, and you’ll have the option of taking the LLM Certificate of Specialisation in AI Law and Regulation. Launching summer 2025, it’s the first of its kind, with an industry-endorsed foundation in AI focused on building core skills and knowledge in areas including intellectual property, data privacy, licensing, and risk. You will discuss real-time legal issues introduced by AI and other emerging technologies. To complete this certificate, you need to complete 11 units from a list of courses that include AI Transactions and Licensing, Antirust and Emerging Technologies, Cybersecurity: Present & Future (3 units), Pro-Innovation Risk Analysis for Lawyers (1 unit), and more.

The certificate’s advisory group of industry leaders include Jennifer Dumas (General Counsel, Allen Institute for AI), Beth George (Partner, Freshfields), Josh Lee Kok Thong (Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, Future of Privacy Forum), Irene Liu (Executive in Residence, Berkeley Law and AI Advisor to California State Senate), and more.

Built on the school’s legacy as the nation’s leading programme in IP and tech law, this certificate will further equip legal professionals to navigate the complexities of AI. “The new degree programme is ideal for both international legal practitioners and US attorneys seeking to future-proof their practice,” said Assistant Dean Adam Sterling. “Students will learn from faculty, practitioner-lecturers, and guest speakers on topics such as AI ethics, the fundamentals of AI technology, and current and future efforts to regulate AI, including a focus on the EU AI Act.”

*Some of the companies featured in this article are commercial partners of Study International