October 19, 2026
Incorporating Legal AI Tools into Transactional Law Courses
Enjoyed presenting “Incorporating Legal AI Tools into Transactional Law Courses” with Robert MacKenzie to the Legal Education Committee of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers (ACREL).
Our main message was that AI belongs in the transactional curriculum. Students need to learn it as a professional skill they practice, not a shortcut. We focused on understanding the strengths and limits of available tools and how to prompt them for higher-quality output.
We spent most of our time on exercises that build legal judgment in law students and new lawyers. In a benchmarking exercise, students compare clauses across a set of contracts to see the drafting choices available and how those choices affect their clients. Students set up a project, write a detailed prompt, iterate with quality-control and verification steps, and then refine the output.
In our “focus group” exercise, students build an AI deal review panel. A panel could have buyer, seller, and lender personas, plus a moderator who challenges everyone’s assumptions. Students can then use the discussion to prepare for negotiation calls.
We also shared other exercises suited to a transactional class, such as building a closing checklist from a deal document to show how the contract’s conditions and deliverables drive the closing.
We closed with a red-yellow-green triage framework that works like delegation: red means judgment calls stay with the student, yellow means drafting can be AI-assisted but must be verified, and green means routine tasks can go to AI.
Our discussion with participants covered how to teach the proper use of legal AI tools, how to talk with students about their (and their clients’!) AI use, and how to assess what students actually understand about AI-supported analysis.
We all have a lot to do to fully integrate legal AI tools into the law school curriculum, but we are heading in the right direction. Thanks to committee leaders Andrea Boyack (Missouri), Shelby Green (Pace), and John Lovett (LSU) for the invite.
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