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Artificial Intelligence Tools and Resources for Law Students

What Is Generative AI Good for?

Gen AI platforms are good at many things, including ways to augment your research. Some include:

  1. Asking questions (remember to fact check the answers!)
  2. Brainstorming ideas
  3. Summarizing (like your class and research notes. Do not use Gen AI to summarize copywritten material without the permission of the owner. Sometimes people sell their rights)
  4. Explaining terms in ways that are easy to understand
  5. Translating to and from many languages

When using Gen AI for research, remember to fact check the answers it produces. Tools can prioritize sounding human over providing accurate information or admitting to not having information.

Generative AI Tools

These are just some of the most popular Gen AI programs/LLMs

ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that can identify and generate human-like text, helping with tasks like answering questions, writing content, or having conversations. It works by analyzing the input you give it and responding based on patterns it learned from a vast amount of information. This is NOT exclusive to ChatGPT, but is how Gen AI tools, including those below, work.

Perplexity is an AI-powered "answer engine" that provides real-time, current, cited information. 

Claude is an AI-powered chatbot popularly used for brainstorming writing, summarizing, following detailed instructions and writing code.

Microsoft Copilot  is an AI assistant integrated across Microsoft's ecosystem of products including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Windows, designed to help users with productivity tasks, document creation, data analysis, and general assistance.

Gemini is designed for tasks such as natural language understanding, image generation, and code creation. It excels over other programs in combining text and image inputs, enabling users to interact with it in more dynamic ways across different contexts.

Legal Research AI

Lexis Protégé is a starting point for legal research and drafting. Protégé has four main features, Ask, Draft, Summarize, and Documents. Protégé links quotes in back to the original source documents to confirm accuracy and ensure that the cited materials are authentic. This tool does not yet have access to the entire Lexis database. Additionally, it may not provide exclusively context-appropriate citations.

Westlaw's AI Assisted Research is Westlaw's Gen AI tool. It responds to legal questions based only on information in Westlaw's databases, including secondary sources. It is susceptible to the same issues as Lexis Protégé.

Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel can perform a variety of tasks to support your legal research needs. In addition to AI Assisted Research, CoCounsel also offers tools for document summaries, document analysis and review, and document drafting.

Ethical Considerations

ABA issues first ethics guidance on a lawyer’s use of AI tools, American Bar Association, July 29, 2024