A new survey of over 1,000 university students found that 92% had used AI tools in their studies. Their reasons for using genAI both mirrors lawyers – and tells us what the future looks like for the legal sector.
Why does this show us what’s coming? For the simple reason that the students of today are the lawyers and clients of tomorrow. If they have become – it would appear – very comfortable with using AI tools for ‘knowledge work’, (and what is study but knowledge work) – then this will have a downstream impact as these young people enter the workforce.
It also suggests that law firms may face staff retention issues, or perhaps even initial hiring barriers, if they are not incorporating AI into their work flows. This was seen in a recent LexisNexis survey, which found that ‘failure to embrace AI’ could lead to 11% considering leaving, which rose to 19% at larger law firms, while 36% at larger law firms believed a lack of AI tools may harm their career progression. See AL article here.
The Student AI Results
So, what did the student AI survey, conducted by the UK-based Higher Education Policy Institute, find?
Beyond the key use figure, they found that the main reason for using AI is ‘to save time’, closely followed by ‘improve the quality of my work’. These are two very different reasons. Moving faster is a ‘no-brainer’ when it comes to being under an essay deadline. But, improving quality is something that perhaps we don’t discuss enough in relation to AI.
I.e. the students don’t see AI as just an efficiency provider, but a way to improve outcomes. In some cases it may be basic areas such as improving grammar and writing style. In others it may be more profound, such as reasoning and concept understanding.
In the latter cases it then raises the issue of who is doing ‘the thinking’ here. If a professor receives a paper designed to display a student’s reasoning, then genAI-backed essays may well supplant that human thinking. The student gets a better paper, the prof gets to read something where they don’t need to wield their red pen so much, and everyone is happy….except, the student may not have learned anything from that exercise…aside from the fact that it’s easier to work with an AI assistant than alone. Of course, one answer is to create tests that will stretch a student’s mind. Plus, some may argue that AI support helps you to learn, rather than prevents it.
Another fascinating insight was that ‘getting support outside traditional study hours’ was a reason for using AI, for 29%. That makes a lot of sense. We can all remember sitting at a desk at university in the evening wondering how to solve a problem, but not having any immediate support – because that was the idea: to figure it out for ourselves. Now with genAI tools, from Perplexity, to ChatGPT and others, we can pose all manner of questions to our laptops and get some decent responses.
In the second chart below, the top use case was ‘explain concepts’, i.e. that a student wants to learn, wants to advance or in this case do well in an assessment, but cannot really understand something. And most likely they cannot just find a professor to help. Enter genAI, which can help.
And other reasons included ‘structure my thoughts’ – which is fascinating, and is especially relevant to the legal world, plus there are more expected ones such as ‘summarise an article’.
Legal Impact
First, the reality is that this change will alter legal education, just as much as it will change other subjects. In fact, perhaps more so, given that the law is text, and one of the key factors involved in assessing students relates to legal reasoning.
More broadly, and as noted above, the legal sector simply cannot assume it can operate without AI – or at least not if it wants a wide range of students to hire into multiple different roles.
Moreover, and as seen at some law firms, if you don’t let people use AI tools – and guide that use – they will try to do it by themselves – and that won’t end well when it comes to legal work.
There is much to explore here, but for now let’s just conclude by saying that what is different now about legal AI and AI in general, is that in 2015 to 2017 that wave of early ML technology just didn’t have the widespread and impactful uptake that we are seeing with genAI now, and that this form of AI is perfectly suited to the legal world – and law students. In turn, this will have significant impacts on how lawyers work.
If anyone reading this still believes their firm or inhouse team can avoid AI, even in the very short term, then they are kidding themselves.
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The full report can be found here.