Law faculty often hesitate to revise their syllabi. If it worked last year, why change it now?

But legal practice and education are changing fast – and if our courses don’t evolve with them, students may miss out.

That’s the message behind two short new articles – to make useful course changes feel possible, manageable, and even fun.

The first article, Getting Help from AI to Update Your Syllabus (Even If You Think It’s Just Fine), encourages faculty to reflect on how the context for teaching dispute resolution has changed — and how AI tools can help adapt without rewriting syllabi from scratch.

The NextGen Bar Exam, launching next year, places dispute resolution at the heart of legal licensing.  Some states are shifting toward practice-based licensing.  And like it or not, AI is now part of daily legal practice.  So students need both the human skills of negotiation and mediation – and the practical know-how to work with AI.

The article offers concrete suggestions for easily updating your syllabus to match your goals.  For example, you can revise exercises to reflect bar changes, rebalance focus between representation and neutral roles, and promote deeper learning – all with the help of AI tools.

Updating syllabi is only part of the picture. The second article, Teaching with AI – and Teaching Students to Use It Well, describes how students engage with assignments and how AI can help them (and you) go deeper.

It focuses on formative assessment – the kind that helps students learn while they’re still learning.  Our courses rely heavily on summative assignments like end-of-semester papers and simulation reflections.  These can be helpful, but they rarely show how students reached their conclusions, what they struggled with, or what they overlooked.

AI-based assignments can change that.  When students submit their chats – showing how they asked questions, revised outlines, or clarified their reasoning – you don’t have to guess what they were thinking. You can actually see their thought process.  And AI tools can help them express their ideas more clearly and concisely.

These assignments are also more fun to read – and easier to grade meaningfully.

Both articles share a common theme: you can revise your teaching without discarding what already works.  AI tools don’t replace your professional judgment – they support it.

Used thoughtfully, AI tools can help students build real-world skills: asking better questions, reflecting more deeply, writing more clearly, and adapting to fast-changing legal practice.

Not only that, when you assign students to use AI tools, you get to learn alongside them, seeing what kinds of prompts produce useful results and which do not.

Have you used AI to develop and/or conduct your course(s) or do you plan to do so?  If so, what have you done or plan to do?

P.S. Another article, Using AI to Promote Student Learning Through Preparation for and Reflection about Simulations, provides a model assignment you can use or adapt.