Every Law School Will Adopt Legal AI Within a Few Years

Notre Dame has just done what every law school dean talks about but few dare. It jumped headfirst into the AI pool by partnering with Harvey, the generative platform that is already reshaping BigLaw workflows. Students, professors, and even the administrators who still print emails will now be working alongside Harvey throughout the coming academic year.

Dean Marcus Cole said it best. Artificial intelligence is no longer a novelty, it is a necessity. (Plagiarism! That's the title of an ARTICLE I published in Attorney at Law Magazine last June!) If tomorrow’s attorneys can quote Blackstone but cannot query an AI, they will be as employable as a stenographer in Silicon Valley.

This is not simply access to a shiny new tool. Notre Dame and Harvey are building coursework together. Students will draft briefs, analyze case law, and even critique the algorithm’s inevitable blunders. They will also confront the ethical minefields: bias, confidentiality, and the temptation to let AI do all the thinking while they sip coffee and call it research.

Do not expect Harvard, Berkeley or Columbia to let the Fighting Irish own the AI spotlight for long. Other elite schools are already circling. Stanford, Michigan, NYU, UCLA and Texas are onboard in various ways.

The arms race in legal education has officially begun.

The irony, of course, is that law schools have spent decades resisting even the most mundane innovations. Many still treat cloud storage as though it were witchcraft. Yet here we are, watching a Catholic institution in Indiana drag legal academia toward the twenty-first century.

My Prediction is Simple. Within five years, every law school worth its endowment will have an AI program. The laggards will be forced to follow, not by vision, but by market reality. Notre Dame is the first to baptize its students in AI, but soon the flood will cover the entire profession.

Frederick Shelton is a Legal AI and Agentic AI Consultant to law firms and lawyers. He can be reached at fs@sheltonsteele.com