Every year, thousands of law students in India sit for examinations that reward one thing above all else: the ability to recall the name of a case, the year it was decided, and the ratio it laid down. That skill has served the profession for a long time. I no longer believe it is the skill that will define a good lawyer ten years from now.
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I have spent over two decades building legal databases and, more recently, artificial intelligence systems that read Indian statutes and judgments. What I see every day is simple. A machine can now retrieve a case faster than any student can memorise it. What the machine cannot do is decide whether that case actually helps a client, whether the other side has a better authority, or whether an argument will survive a sceptical judge. That is legal reasoning, and it is what law schools should be teaching with far greater intensity than they do today.
AI literacy is no longer optional
A young lawyer entering practice in 2026 will encounter AI tools on the first day, whether the firm has formally adopted them or not. Seniors will ask for a research note that was clearly prepared with assistance. Opposing counsel will file submissions drafted the same way. Courts themselves are thinking carefully about the question. The Supreme Court’s draft regulations on the use of AI in courts, circulated earlier this year, show how seriously the judiciary takes both the promise and the risk.
In that environment, a graduate who does not understand how these tools work, what they are good at and where they fail is at a disadvantage. AI literacy for lawyers does not mean learning to code. It means knowing how to frame a legal question precisely, how to read the output critically, how to check every source, and how to explain to a client or a court what the tool did and what the lawyer did. That is a professional competence, and it belongs in the curriculum.
Bringing AI assisted research into the curriculum
The most important shift AI makes possible is pedagogical. If retrieval is handled by a machine, classroom time can move to the harder work: constructing an argument, anticipating the counterargument, and defending a position.
Picture a constitutional law tutorial where every student arrives with the relevant precedents already assembled. The hour is not spent reciting them. It is spent asking which of them the Bench is most likely to follow, which one the respondent will rely on, and how the petitioner should distinguish it. The student who thrives in that room is the one who thinks, not the one who remembers.
This is closer to how law is actually practised. No senior advocate is valued for recall alone. They are valued for judgment. Legal education has always claimed to build judgment. AI simply removes the excuse for spending most of the syllabus on something else.
Law schools can start without waiting for a national mandate. A research methods course can include a module on AI-assisted legal research, taught with the same rigour as citation formats and library skills. Students can be given the same problem twice, once with traditional methods and once with an AI tool, and asked to compare not just speed but quality and accuracy.
Moot court programmes are a natural home for this. Preparing a memorial today involves weeks of case hunting. With AI handling the first pass, students can spend those weeks testing weaknesses in their own position and rehearsing rebuttals. Legal aid clinics run by law schools can also benefit, because intake, issue spotting and first drafts consume time that students could otherwise spend with the people they are helping.
None of this requires abandoning the doctrinal foundation. Students still need to understand the law deeply. But depth of understanding is different from breadth of memorisation, and the two have been confused for too long.
Closing the gap between classroom and practice
Employers have complained for years that graduates arrive knowing the law but not the work. AI tools, used well, can narrow that gap. A student who has drafted a contract clause with assistance, checked it against the governing statute, and been marked on the quality of the review has done something very close to what a first year associate does.
The reverse is also true. A student who has learned to accept whatever a tool produces has learned a habit that will get them into serious trouble.
Courts in India and abroad have already dealt with filings containing citations to judgments that do not exist. In every such instance, the failure was not technological. It was human. Someone was handed an authority and did not open it.
Legal education must therefore teach responsible use alongside capability. Every student should leave law school knowing three things: that a citation is not real until it has been verified against the source; that confidentiality obligations do not disappear because a tool is convenient; and that the duty to the court cannot be delegated to software. Ethics courses should treat these as live professional questions, not as a footnote.
The lawyer of the future will not be the one who knows the most cases. It will be the one who reasons best, verifies most carefully, and uses the tools available with honesty and skill. Our law schools have an opportunity to produce exactly that lawyer. They should take it.
(Saakar Yadav is the Founder of Lexlegis.ai, a legal AI platform built on Indian statutes and case law. Views are personal.)
Published – September 16, 2026 08:47 am IST
