Two teams of Minnesota Law professors are exploring how new technologies can help shape the future of legal education — in the classroom and in the field — as recipients of the inaugural grants from the Kommerstad Faculty Imagination Fund.

Professors Amy Monahan, Daniel Schwarcz and Jon Choi received $15,000 to test whether using artificial intelligence (AI) language models can improve the performance of students on legal writing tasks. This experiment expands on a paper they wrote with Professor Kristin Hickman, “ChatGPT Goes to Law School,” which drew widespread attention after the generative AI chatbot averaged “a low but passing grade” on final exams in four fall semester courses. Prof. Choi, who late last month announced he was departing Minnesota Lawto join the faculty of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, will continue to collaborate on the project. 

Professors Chris Roberts and Ryan Greenwood will put their $5,000 grant toward developing a course that includes taking students into the field to consider how advanced technologies may outpace existing law in areas such as transportation, civic infrastructure and AI. The course also would partner with the Law Library to examine the implications that new technologies may have on advanced legal research. 

“Sometimes the answers to where we’re headed simply cannot be in the case books,” Roberts said. “We have to go elsewhere to learn and that’s really what this project is about. This is a frontier right now.”

These grants are the first that the Law School has made from the Kommerstad Faculty Imagination Fund. The fund supports faculty pursuit of innovative research and scholarship that amplifies the influence of their work as teachers, scholars and thought leaders.

The legal writing project, Schwarcz said, will assess how two groups of students perform in completing documents briefs, memos and contracts. One group will receive training in ChatGPT and must use it to write their documents. The other students will be not be allowed to use ChatGPT in their work.

The students will track the time they spend on their writing assignments, which the professors will blindly grade. The professors then will analyze the resulting data to assess whether using AI models improves the efficiency or the quality — or both — of the legal writing the students produce.

AI models like ChatGPT have “transformative potential” for legal education and legal practice, Schwarcz said. They may make many tasks easier for lawyers and change the skill set that lawyers need to work productively and competitively.

Leadership in AI research will help position the Law School as “modern (and) forward thinking,” Schwarcz and colleagues said in their grant proposal.

“It's important that we don't run away from technology but embrace it,” Schwarcz said. “That’s what the future demands. That’s what our students want. That’s what the profession needs. Moving in that direction is important.”

In combining classroom and field-based experiences, Roberts said, the course he and Greenwood propose would build on units he has taught in his Advanced Torts, Special Topics in Administrative Law and Rights in Conflict courses. The new course would include experts in accident reconstruction, engineering and AI model development to address areas where technology may be ahead of the law.

In the transportation module of the course, students would learn about liability, social justice and other legal issues related to collision avoidance technology and AI in autonomous vehicles, which Roberts said studies have shown are more likely to drive into people of color. In the field portion, an accident reconstruction expert would demonstrate vehicle technologies and capabilities for students to analyze.

The civic infrastructure module would include a demonstration of 3D imaging technology and drones that engineers use to inspect bridges, Roberts said. It also would cover how inspections of bridges, roads and highways and the technology involved in those efforts have changed since the 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35 bridge over the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis.

In the AI module, the class would learn about the concerns of developers of generative AI models, working at the University of Minnesota and in the Twin Cities, that lawyers may need to address. 

Greenwood, rare book coordinator at the Law Library, said old books and archives can help point the way forward. Virtual reality technology can enable students to interact with old texts and make them more accessible. 

“Reflecting on the history of the law, which is what we can do with all of this old material, these rare books and archives, can help us think about the future of the law too,” Greenwood said. 

“In with my work with Ryan, we're looking at these inflection points, these moments in which there are new ideas and new ways to think about things and how in the past, people have grappled with and successfully risen to the challenge of a moment of change,” Roberts said.

The Kommerstad Faculty Imagination Fund is but one of the funds and initiatives that businessman and philanthropist Robert M. Kommerstad ’52 (1927–2002) and his wife Lila M. Kommerstad (1925–2020) have helped the Law School establish and strengthen.