By: Michele Lynn
As artificial intelligence expands its reach, UNC School of Law continues to build a curriculum enabling law students to graduate with the AI skills needed in today’s legal profession.
The School has added three new elective courses for second-year and third-year students to the 2026-27 curriculum, designed to address three pillars of AI educational goals for lawyers: AI literacy, AI fluency and AI design. This new suite of courses targets multiple goals for integrating AI into legal education.
In AI literacy for lawyers, students will gain a technical understanding of AI tools so that they can be used responsibly and practically to accomplish legal tasks. Taught by Nicole Downing ’12, clinical professor of law and assistant director for public services at the Kathrine R. Everett Law Library, the class will enable students to become proficient with AI.
Beyond gaining AI literacy, students will have the opportunity to build an AI tool in AI and tool design, taught by Law and Technology Librarian and Clinical Assistant Professor of Law Michelle Rodenburg. The class is designed to identify legal problems that could be addressed by an AI tool, while mitigating problems that may arise. “We want to make sure that in their design, students are using information that is reliable and reduces hallucinations, bias and other challenges they need to be aware of when using generative AI,” said Rodenburg.
In preparation for completing the course’s capstone project of designing a tool, students will learn about user interface design. In the final weeks of the class, students will each present their tools and use one another’s tools to provide feedback. Downing said that these students will become lawyers who not only use AI tools, but design and deploy tools to solve legal workflow issues.
Rodenburg said that students will learn through trial and error and observe unintended results that may occur when training a tool from the ground up. She is excited for students to be able to include this experience on their resumes, implementing and using an AI tool that they designed to address a gap they identified in the legal sector.
The third new course, AI in practice, is taught by adjunct faculty member John Sieman ’07, patent counsel at SAS. Students learn about issues they will face as AI starts to become a more entrenched part of business and legal practice. “The course will have students think about legal issues related to using AI in practice, such as risk management and contracting,” said Downing. “While this class will be very different from the two other new classes, it is still very much about AI. It focuses on putting students into realistic scenarios that confront the legal challenges of adopting AI.”
The curriculum strategy balances graduating AI-literate and AI-competent lawyers while preserving foundational first-year legal education. “We’re being as thoughtful as possible in thinking about how we are integrating AI into our curriculum, while making sure our students still spend their first year learning how to think like a lawyer, conduct research, read the law and write about the law,” said Downing. “While first-year law students might see AI in their legal research and writing courses, that first year is about the fundamentals of law, and that needs to be preserved.” She added that in all these classes, understanding responsible use is key.
Willie Person Mangum Distinguished Professor Joseph Kennedy, who chairs Carolina Law’s AI Working Group, is teaching artificial intelligence and the law this semester. “One of our most important challenges is to ensure that we continue to do what we already do very well — which is to help students develop the analytical skills and knowledge to be good lawyers — at the same time that they learn to use these tools,” said Kennedy. “The most important challenge we face, as legal educators, is to thread the needle between helping our students learn to use the tools while still developing their own analytical abilities.”
In addition to Kennedy’s class and the three new courses, the School offers other opportunities in the curriculum to become AI literate. The professional responsibility course examines how existing model rules apply in an AI context, law practice technologies classes strengthen technical proficiency, and advanced legal research classes educate students about available AI tools.
The law library added two new legal AI tools, Harvey and Legora, to its offerings this summer. These applications, in addition to Lexis+ Protégé and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, are increasingly part of lawyers’ daily workflows. Downing said that adding the new tools gives faculty the opportunity to explore the software being used by practitioners and consider ways to incorporate them into their courses and teaching. At the same time, having these new tools allows students to join the workforce with the knowledge employers are seeking.
Generative AI skills are being sought by law offices when making hiring decisions. “We are focusing on making sure that our law graduates — whether they love generative AI technology or whether they hate it — are equipped with the AI literacy to understand how the technology works, understand when it can work well, and when it won’t,” said Rodenburg.
