The strongest reaction was that law schools are being forced to admit something the profession already knows. A lot of legal work is structured text, repetitive review, template drafting, and document wrangling. People with direct legal experience said LLMs are already compressing
discovery, contract review, and breach notice work from a day to hours. That made the school policy feel less like a classroom debate and more like a lagging response to a workflow change already underway.
The more serious concern was not whether AI can help lawyers today. It was whether it hollows out the apprenticeship model that creates good lawyers tomorrow. Junior associates historically learn through boring, low-status tasks like research, document review, drafting, and sitting in on calls and depositions. If clients stop paying for that work because AI does it faster and cheaper, firms lose both revenue and the training ground that built experienced judgment. Several comments converged on the same point: accountability is still the core thing clients buy from lawyers, but accountability only has value if the person signing off actually developed judgment the slow way.
That is why many readers liked Chicago’s insistence on oral defense, closed-book exams, and some AI-free writing. The point is not nostalgia. It is to keep testing whether a student can reason, notice detail, and stand behind an argument without outsourcing the hard parts. Skeptics still saw a lot of legal education as signaling, gatekeeping, and institutional self-protection, and some argued AI will make elite credentials less valuable by letting non-lawyers handle more routine work. But even many bullish commenters drew a line between using AI to search, summarize, and produce first drafts versus trusting it on strategy, negotiation, or edge cases where tiny factual differences change the whole legal analysis. The bottom line was not “AI replaces lawyers” or “AI changes nothing.” It was that legal work is being unbundled fast, and schools that do not redesign for both tool use and independent judgment will train graduates for a market that no longer exists.
law.uchicago.edu