Russell Alexander Law Scholarship
Only 20 days left to apply!
The recipient of the Russell Alexander Law Scholarship will receive up to $2,000 toward the tuition for their post-secondary education, in addition to a $500 bonus to help cover the cost of school supplies of their choice, such as technology, textbooks, notebooks, etc.
Eligibility Requirements:
- Must be interested in joining the legal industry
- Must have a grade average of 80% or higher
- Submit an application on russellalexander.com
The deadline is June 30, 2024.
2023 Winning Essay
The application includes an essay component. For inspiration, let’s look at the scholarship recipient’s essay from last year. It was a response to the question “How do you see artificial intelligence or technology and innovation impacting the field of family law in the next 5-10 years?”
An Aspiring Attorney’s Guide to AI
Author: Calvin Cao
I’ve been learning to draw. One afternoon, six months ago, I’d spent hours studying faces, scrutinizing my skull model, and copying diagrams in my art textbook. During a break, I flipped through my past month’s sketches. My drawings ranged from incoherent blobs to vaguely resembling living things.
Out of curiosity, I opened my laptop and prompted the Midjourney image AI to create a “mysterious painting of a woman looking at the viewer.” The results were not good. I chuckled, feeling better about myself. Midjourney has received a flurry of updates in the months since. Today, I gave it the same prompt.
Figure 1 – Response to Prompt in December 2022 vs. Today
Its flawless anatomical accuracy shocked me. I’m glad I’m not banking on becoming a professional artist. But how much longer until AI replaces lawyers too? In ten years, will defendants appear in court with a ChatGPT lawyer pleading to the Google Bard judge?
ChatGPT already ticks many boxes on a legal associate’s job description. Feed it ten thousand discovery documents and it extracts key evidence in seconds. The same task would take dozens of humans weeks. A quick prompt and it writes a perfect contract or court motion. Ask it to summarize an obscure nineteenth-century law, and the answer is served before a human associate can find the right book (New York Times). This technology has massive potential for good—alleviating these tasks means law firms can focus on what really matters, delivering effective justice, and at a more accessible cost. But AI has many fearing for their jobs. Will legal firms continue employing humans when a free chatbot can do the same work? If not, can my generation of aspiring attorneys anticipate and adapt to the unprecedented technological trends unfolding?
To predict the future, we can investigate the past. In art class, I studied pre-neoclassical art history. Art’s goal for most of history was to capture reality with maximum accuracy. Thus, when the camera was invented, artists panicked. What was the point of painting now?
In response, artists like Monet and Van Gough emerged. They captured what a photo could not – human emotion and perception, their impressions of a moment in time. The invention of photography freed Impressionists, as they were called, from the confines of realism. The supposed art-killer that was the camera actually began the vibrant, diverse visual culture of today.
Figure 2 – Neoclassicism (David, Oath of the Horatii) vs. Impressionism (Van Gough, Starry Night)
AI can never be like the Impressionists. It can mix and regurgitate existing ideas. But even if it was trained on a million Neoclassical masterpieces, it could never extrapolate like Monet or Van Gough or Picasso, pushing the confines of art itself.
Law is the same. AI can copy the thinking of humans that came before it. But there will always be cases that demand a class of analysis never before performed. This is especially true in fields like family law. An AI attorney trained only on dry legal records could never understand the emotional complexities unique to each case: each word spoken by a father, every hour spent with a mother, every tear shed by a child.
There has been scare after scare that lawyers will become obsolete. (“The typewriter will kill legal jobs!” … “The computer will kill legal jobs!” … “Data analytics will kill legal jobs!” …) Truth is, legal sector jobs have grown faster than the national most years since the statistic has been tracked, according to the Bureau of Labor. No invention in human history, from the camera to the calculator to the computer, has actually caused mass unemployment. They simply pushed humans to upskill and take on tasks machines could not do.
My generation of lawyers will be successful, as long as they adapt. We’ll need to focus our studies on what neural networks cannot accomplish. Empathizing with humans. Approaching unique cases with little precedent the AI can rely on. To remain competitive, they’ll need to learn and embrace new AI legal software. They must also understand how to use AI responsibly and mitigate its risks. Every law student should sign up for the National Judicial College’s AI and the Rule of Law online course, which covers this subject.
Some jobs will be lost. AI will turn the world upside-down. But for well-prepared lawyers-in-training, it could be the key to casting off the shackles of anatomically correct faces, and painting the picture of our dreams.
Works Cited
Lohr, Steve. “A.I. Is Coming for Lawyers, Again.” The New York Times, 10 Apr. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/technology/ai-is-coming-for-lawyers-again.html.
National Judicial College. “Artificial Intelligence and the Rule of Law.” The National Judicial College, Mar. 2022, www.judges.org/ai_and_law/english/.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Lawyers: Occupational Outlook Handbook.” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 8 Sept. 2022, www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm.
