Mississippi College School of Law is one of the first schools in the nation to tackle the growing influence of artificial intelligence in jurisprudence by making AI education mandatory for all students.

For John Anderson, dean of the school, the goal is to train law students “to use the technology effectively, efficiently, and ethically and avoid a lot of the headlines that you’ve seen already where lawyers take shortcuts by using these technologies.”

MC is the first law school in the Southeast to require all students to complete an AI course. While the school has other AI classes, a general course is now mandatory for all first-year students.

Last month, first-year students completed the college’s first mandatory class on AI, a two day intensive course that culminated with a hands-on project.

Artificial intelligence refers to any technology or machine that simulates human intelligence, such as performing problem solving, decision making and reasoning. Researchers have been working on AI since the 1940s but it only began to reshape the world in the past few years.

Companies have released chatbots that people can talk to as if to another human. People can ask a bot to generate conversations, text, images and software code. But using and training AI models requires a massive amount of computing power in the form of chips that are housed in large data centers. In Mississippi, companies are expected to spend over $60 billion dollars to build data centers in the state.

There are state laws concerning specific misuses of AI but some legislators are attempting to put broader guardrails in place. Sen. Bradford Blackmon, a Democrat from Canton, authored a number of bills this session that aimed to provide boundaries for AI usage. None of the bills became law but Blackmon told Mississippi Today that he plans on bringing at least one bill back next year.

As AI adoption in the legal system has grown, there have been instances where certain AI models made up defendants, quotes and cases.

Last year, a federal judge in Mississippi admitted that his staff used AI to draft a court order full of mistakes. In another case, a judge fined a lawyer $20,000 for using AI in court filings. MC wants to prepare its students for this new reality and teach them how to use the technology ethically.

Oliver Roberts, editor-in-chief of AI at The National Law Review, and his company, Wickard AI, designed and taught the course at MC Law. He said that students were engaged and enthusiastic about the course and the technology’s possibilities.

“Whether you like AI or not, I believe you should be learning about it because you can strengthen your arguments for it or against it by learning the foundational concepts of it,” Roberts said.

The course covers widely used tools, such as the Westlaw AI research program, and the regulatory environment and ethical use of AI. As part of the course, Roberts brought Blackmon in to talk about the emerging AI landscape in Mississippi. But the course was not just theoretical, as for their final project students were asked to use AI to create prototypes of a legal apps.

“This was purely the students getting creative, investigating shortcomings and inefficiencies in law and then actively developing solutions,” Roberts said.

Students created a range of products including tools to help with jury selection strategy and look for potential biases, draft legal memos and automate billable time tracking.

For Anderson, the need for AI education for his law students crystallized at a 5th Circuit judicial conference in 2023. One presenter demonstrated how an AI model could comb through millions of documents and create a draft within seconds, a task that would take a whole team of lawyers to do.

“Of course you’re not going to submit this but you’ve got a first draft that is pretty darn good,” Anderson said.

The first-year law course is just one part of Mississippi College’s larger effort to be a leader in ethical and cutting edge AI education, usage and policy.

Last year, the college launched the Center for AI Policy and Technology Leadership, a collaboration between the business and law schools. The center will produce academic papers, white papers and training for students and working professionals.

Anderson said the law school has some exciting projects in the works and more announcements coming.

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This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.