Imagine that you’re sitting in a law school classroom learning how to build a generative AI tool. Now imagine that this tool you create is released to millions of people to help them understand and navigate the law. Starting this fall, this scenario will become reality for students at the University of Chicago Law School thanks to a new course called the AI Lab.

“It’s unlike anything we have ever done,” said William H. J. Hubbard, the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law and deputy dean. “This initiative is not merely about helping students understand how to use AI tools in their legal work, it’s about creating AI tools so that students are standing in the shoes of a tech entrepreneur.” 

Hubbard is chair of the Law School’s AI committee, which for the last two years has been keeping a pulse on AI use in the legal profession and finding ways to incorporate AI into the curriculum. The AI Lab is just one initiative to come out of these efforts—and it’s perhaps the most innovative one yet.

“We want our students to be prepared to succeed professionally in the intersecting space of AI and the law, which is only going to keep growing,” said Hubbard. “This new opportunity will allow students to learn about it in a very immersive, hands-on way, and from an expert who has tangible experience.”

That expert is Kimball Dean Parker, ’13, a lawyer turned legal tech entrepreneur—who is also a former student of Hubbard. Passionate about harnessing technology to help people and businesses navigate the complexities of the law, Parker is founder and CEO of SixFifty, a tech company that assists businesses in staying compliant with employment law through a library of automated employment law documents and a specialized AI database of employment law summaries that captures the law in every jurisdiction. 

Explaining the construction of SixFifty’s database, Parker said: “We used something called retrieval augmented generation to instruct the AI to not look at the internet and only look at our database of employment law information to answer questions from our customers. And the results have been magical—the accuracy rate is the highest in the industry.”

How Will It Work?

The AI Lab will follow a similar model to what Parker created in SixFifty, except the legal focus will be the rights of renters nationwide.  

Students enrolled in the lab will spend the fall quarter building a database of meticulously researched summaries around that area of the law. The workshop will challenge students to approach the project with an entrepreneurial mindset as they learn what goes into making a legal-tech product. Part of the work will involve determining scope of need: Students will interview people to understand what questions they have around the topic to make sure that the tool they create is useful to general users. 

“Generative AI is like a blender,” explained Parker. “The better the ingredients you put into the blender, the better the end-product will be. So, we’ll create a top-tier database of legal summaries and put it into our AI blender.  And by the end of the course, we’ll release it to the public.”

The final product will be an AI chatbot, not unlike ChatGPT, focused on the rights of renters. The goal is to create something much more accurate and reliable than a general AI chat—a product that would serve individuals who need legal help but for financial reasons or otherwise do not have access to a lawyer.

“Every single state has different rules and different laws around renter rights, and a lot of the information is very hard to find and in language that’s not easy to understand,” said Parker. “The goal is to create a tool that makes the law—in this case, landlord tenant law—accessible to renters and landlords. There’s potential here to make a real impact on people’s lives.”

It’s not the first time Parker has developed a law school tech program designed to assist with access to justice. At Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, he taught a course in which he and students developed a legal-tech tool to assist with access to justice. However, that tool was not AI-based, making the AI Lab at UChicago Law a leap forward in terms of technology. In fact, there are only a few intensive AI workshops like the AI Lab anywhere in the country.

Law Students in the AI Sandbox

Learning how to use an AI tool as a lawyer is one thing—but learning how to build one is quite another. So, what makes this a valuable exercise for law students? 

With AI now embedded into almost every research platform that lawyers and soon-to-be lawyers will use, it’s crucial for law students to understand the nature of the technology, explained Parker. Developing a competency and familiarity with AI will make it easier for students to learn any similar tool they may encounter in the future—even ones that may not exist yet.

“AI is like putty; you have to play with it to understand it,” he said. “The AI Lab is an opportunity for students to play in the sandbox of AI, to get hands-on experience with the defining technology of our age. Learning how to interact with it and learning its limitations will help students learn how to best leverage it now and later down the line, wherever their careers may lead them.”

And why the Law School? 

“UChicago Law is a hotbed of ideas and innovation,” said Parker. “It has the smartest students and a renowned faculty. It’s the perfect place for this kind of project. I’m excited to dive in and see what we can create.”