OpenAI Interest Groups

AI in Higher Education

Caltech CTME & Goldhirsh Foundation

Caltech CTME AI Strategy & AI Executive in Residence @ Caltech CTME & Goldhirsh Foundation

Wharton

Executive MBA Student @ Wharton

Stanford University

Director of Clinical Pathology Informatics @ Stanford University

OpenAI

Human Data / Forum Community Ambassador @ OpenAI

Kennesaw State University

Lead Academic Data Scientist @ Kennesaw State University

CUNY

Lecturer @ CUNY

Harvard Business School

Student @ Harvard Business School

Professor @ Harvard Business School

Education GTM @ OpenAI

NYU Stern School of Business

Chief AI Architect @ NYU Stern School of Business

One of the questions I hear the most during presentations is how we are supposed to teach legal writing now that generative AI is in the mix. For those outside legal education, legal writing is not just formal writing. It is technical, grounded in precedent, and often persuasive in nature. In other words, it is structured communication that operates within a very specific rhetorical and professional framework.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can sometimes do a decent job at this. If you give them a solid prompt and a strong sample, they can turn around work that looks, at first glance, pretty competent. But anyone who has actually worked in this space knows the truth. It is not always good. Sometimes it is flat-out wrong. And the problem is not just the occasional hallucination or lack of nuance. The real issue is that students cannot evaluate the output if they do not already know what good legal writing looks like.

This is the point I try to make in conversations with faculty. We do not need every student to be a Pulitzer-winning writer. What we need is for them to act more like editors. A good editor might not be able to write a brilliant novel from scratch, but they can take something flawed and make it better. They know how to assess tone, structure, clarity, logic, and factual accuracy. These are the exact skills our students will need when working with AI-generated text.

Most of the legal tech tools being adopted today rely on OpenAI API calls or similar integrations. That means students will be using these systems whether we like it or not. If we do not teach them how to read, critique, and revise AI output, then we are setting them up to fail. Banning the tools is not a real solution. Teaching critical editorial skills is.

I'd love to hear your ideas or analogies so that I can help win over skeptical law school professors on this topic because the alternative in many cases is black-balling it in the classroom and I do not think that is productive.

Chicken Before the Egg, Teaching Technical Writing to LawStudents

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