The Signal Worth Reading
In July, the University of Chicago Law School published its official strategy for teaching law in the age of AI. This matters less for what it means inside a classroom than for what it signals to the rest of us. When one of the most tradition-bound, intellectually demanding law schools in the country sits down for three years, consults its faculty, its alumni, and the firms that hire its graduates, and produces a formal statement on artificial intelligence, the conclusion it reaches is worth a practicing lawyer's attention.
The conclusion is not that AI is a fad to wait out. It is not that AI is a threat to be banned. It is that AI is now a permanent part of legal practice, and the job of a serious institution is to prepare people to use it well. Chicago put the point plainly: their graduates will be expected to be prepared to use these tools in practice. Not permitted. Expected.
Read that as the weather report it is. The lawyers being trained today are being trained on the assumption that AI is part of the work. The firms hiring them expect it. The question for those of us already in practice is no longer whether this is coming. It is whether we will be ready when the people who grew up with it arrive.
What Chicago Actually Decided
The strategy rests on three ideas, and each one lands squarely on something practicing lawyers already understand in their bones.
The first is that judgment cannot be outsourced. Chicago's plan is built to make sure students still learn to think critically and independently, without leaning on AI to do the thinking for them. They went as far as removing laptops from first-year classrooms and returning to closed-book, in-person exams. The point is not nostalgia. It is that the ability to reason through a problem yourself is the foundation everything else sits on. A lawyer who cannot judge whether an answer is right has no business relying on a machine that produces answers.
The second idea is that some parts of lawyering will stay human, not because a machine could never attempt them, but because clients, judges, and juries will always want a person doing them. Chicago's list is telling: oral advocacy, strategic judgment, critical thinking, and the work of building real relationships with clients. Any trial lawyer will recognize that list. It is the part of the job that was never really about volume of hours. It is the part that is actually the practice of law.
The third idea is the one most relevant to a working practice. Chicago concluded that teaching students to use today's specific tools is not enough, because the tools will change. What lasts is the underlying skill: the ability to supervise AI, to critique its output, to adapt as the technology shifts. They want students who can review, assess, and improve what AI produces. That is not a software lesson. It is a discipline.
Why This Should Matter to a Small Firm
Here is the translation from the classroom to the caseload.
A top law school has three years, a faculty committee, licenses with the major AI companies, and a dedicated lab to work all of this out deliberately. A solo or small firm has none of that. It has a caseload, a calendar, and a client who needs an answer this week. The institutions preparing the next generation of lawyers have the luxury of a measured, multi-year approach. Most practicing lawyers do not.
But the conclusion Chicago reached is available to any firm willing to take it seriously, and it is simpler than three years of committee work suggests. Keep your judgment sharp. Use AI deliberately, not casually. And build the durable skill of supervising it well, rather than chasing whichever tool is ascendant this quarter.
That last point is worth sitting with. Chicago is explicitly not betting on any particular product. They are betting on the skill of working with AI as a category, because they expect the specific tools to be replaced. A small firm should make the same bet. The lawyer who ties their practice to one platform is exposed the moment that platform changes. The lawyer who has built the underlying discipline — how to prompt, how to verify, how to fold AI into a real workflow without letting it touch the judgment that has to stay human — carries that discipline into whatever comes next.
The Part They Said Out Loud
There is one more line in Chicago's statement worth repeating, because it is the whole thing in miniature. They wrote that no statement of an AI strategy can be final, because the technology is changing too fast, and that all of it will be revisited as both the technology and the practice of law evolve.
A prestigious institution, publishing a careful strategy, and openly saying it will not hold. That is not a weakness in their thinking. It is the most honest thing in the document, and it is the reality every practicing lawyer is already living. The tools will keep changing. The firms that do well will not be the ones that picked the right tool. They will be the ones that built the habit of adapting — the judgment to use these systems, the discipline to supervise them, and the sense to keep the human work human.
The future of legal practice is already being taught. It is worth knowing what it looks like.