Client Context
Our client, a major player in legal education and credentialing, sought to understand the disruptive potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) across law schools and legal practice. With AI adoption accelerating among students, faculty, and firms, the client needed a comprehensive view of how GenAI is changing workflows, expectations, and institutional behavior. This effort was designed to inform internal product development strategy and ensure external offerings remained competitive, compliant, and mission-aligned.
Our Approach
The engagement was structured into four key research streams:
Adoption Landscape Analysis: We mapped current usage of GenAI tools across higher education, legal academia, and professional practice. This included sourcing adoption data from leading surveys, case studies, and institutional pilots, with a focus on emerging patterns among students, faculty, and legal employers.
Strategic Use Case Identification: We surfaced dozens of concrete, high-value use cases for AI integration, spanning student-facing, school-facing, and internal operational opportunities. These included AI tools for admissions support, research augmentation, interactive training environments, and legal workflow transformation.
Risk and Ethics Assessment: We evaluated legal, reputational, and compliance risks tied to AI usage across domains such as admissions, academic integrity, and client-facing tools. Particular attention was given to hallucination risks, fairness, bias mitigation, and the limits of automation in high-stakes processes.
Readiness and Positioning Guidance: We assessed the client’s internal readiness to engage in GenAI-enabled product development, and proposed a strategic framework to align AI initiatives with the organization’s core values of equity, access, and integrity.
Impact
Our research surfaced a series of high-priority findings that directly informed the client’s AI roadmap:
· Student adoption of AI is near-universal: Over 85% of law school applicants and students report using GenAI tools for academic work, with many replacing traditional research tools like Google and LexisNexis.
· Faculty and institutions lag behind: Only 28% of universities have formal GenAI policies in place, and law schools remain fragmented in their curricular and admissions approaches. This opens a window for leadership and standard-setting.
· Legal employers are automating fast: 80% of law firms now use GenAI tools, with entry-level legal work under threat and flat-fee billing models on the rise. AI is reshaping employer expectations for future legal professionals.
· Credibility, equity, and transparency are essential: Applicants are wary of AI’s role in admissions, with 75% preferring schools that don’t use AI for evaluation. At the same time, they want clarity and fairness from institutions using GenAI tools.
· Product opportunities are real, but sensitive: We outlined several ethically grounded, high-impact product ideas, including AI-powered personal statement coaches, admissions chatbots, and interview simulators. All were framed with disclosure, human oversight, and mission alignment in mind.
This work enabled our client to move forward with confidence in an emerging and highly scrutinized space. By identifying where GenAI can amplify human judgment without displacing it, and by mapping both the opportunity and the guardrails, we helped our client define a differentiated position as a trusted, thoughtful leader in the AI era of legal education.
