Russell Alexander Law Scholarship
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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, 2026.
2025 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 “Family law is constantly evolving to reflect societal changes, including shifts in marriage trends, cohabitation, and parenting structures. What do you think is the most significant challenge facing family law today, and how should legal professionals address it?”
Winning Answer
Author: Maria MacDonald
When GPT-4 passed the bar exam in July 2022, lawyers and developers began to imagine artificial intelligence’s place in the legal field. Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology used by computers and machines to simulate the human mind in learning, problem-solving, and decision making. It has been increasingly used across different sectors like healthcare and finance to perform initial research and summarize and analyze data. This ability to organize large volumes of documents is seen as promising to increase the productivity and efficiency of family legal professionals.
However, the usage of AI poses significant challenges towards family law, including concerns about fabricating information, client confidentiality, and the billable hour model. Although artificial intelligence is constantly improving, it is not perfect and sometimes “hallucinates” or fabricates information. This can have serious consequences in the legal field. When attorneys Peter LoDuca and Steven Schwartz submitted a legal brief written by ChatGPT that included made-up citations and false court opinions, a New York federal judge sanctioned the two lawyers and they each had to pay a $5,000 fine. Because ChatGPT fabricated information that the lawyers submitted in their brief, they faced reputational damage. Therefore, it’s crucial to take into consideration AI’s inaccuracies when using it for legal purposes. Additionally, many AI tools use user input for training their models. In the legal field, this could be risky because it may mean that sensitive client information would be exposed. Especially when many AI servers are American-owned, Canadian client data could be leaked because of the Patriot Act, which enables US authorities to access records held by American companies. Ensuring client confidentiality is an ethical and legal obligation, so the usage of AI could be a risk for Canadian family lawyers. Furthermore, the usage of AI challenges the billable hour model traditionally used by lawyers. Billable hours are the hours that lawyers work on activities such as conducting research, drafting documents, or appearing in court, that are directly tied to their client’s case. However, with AI, routine legal tasks like research and preparing documents or financial statements can be done in minutes. This efficiency poses a challenge towards the billable hour model and creates concerns about how lawyers can charge reasonable fees for their work.
Despite the usage of AI posing many challenges, family legal professionals can mitigate concerns by understanding the risks, using safe AI models, embracing the technology for menial tasks, and exploring other billing models. By teaching their teams about AI, family law firms can use AI effectively by prompt engineering, which is creating specific questions to obtain more accurate results. As well, when firms teach their teams to carefully review AI-generated content, the risk of “hallucinations” is decreased. To ensure client confidentiality, family law firms should use AI tools that use closed models instead of public AI models like ChatGPT. A closed model means that the underlying code or training data is kept confidential and cannot be accessed by the public. Therefore, lawyers can use AI to increase the efficiency of their work but still maintain client privilege. Like in many fields, some lawyers are concerned that AI will “steal” or “kill” their jobs. But, this isn’t necessarily true. Yes, AI is likely to automate routine tasks performed by lawyers like legal research, data processing, financial statement preparation, and contract drafting using tools like Supio and Spellbook. But, this just means that lawyers will be freed up to focus on case strategy and interacting with their clients. Routine work will be replaced by AI, leaving lawyers to focus on higher-value activities. With the introduction of AI, lawyers can still be fairly compensated for their work. By exploring value-based pricing or block fees, legal professionals can be more productive by using AI while not experiencing a dip in their pay check.
Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can enhance family lawyers’ efficiency and capabilities. However, it poses many challenges so it is important to use it ethically and responsibly to protect clients.
