UH Law Launches Center to Study AI’s Impact on Legal Profession, Presents Program Examining Role of AI in Legal Education, Law Firms and Courts
- Artificial intelligence is transforming legal education, the practice of law, and court operations, but its value depends on people critically evaluating its output, speakers stressed during a University of Houston Law Center program titled “AI, Law, and the Legal Profession.”
The three-hour virtual continuing legal education program examined AI’s growing role and impact in different legal spheres. The event, featuring 12 law professors, attorneys, technology leaders and a federal judge, was part of the launch of UH Law’s Center for AI, Law and the Legal Profession.
“AI is changing the way lawyers work, the way courts operate, the way legal services are delivered, and the way law schools prepare the next generation of attorneys,” UH Law Dean Leonard M. Baynes said during his opening remarks. “Technology is moving really fast and so are the questions it raises. That’s one reason we are especially excited about the launch of the Center.”
Baynes said the Law Center has “embraced the responsibility to help shape the conversation rather than simply react to it.” He noted the new center and its first program as examples of the Law Center’s bridge-building, “bringing together legal educators, practitioners, judges and technology leaders to learn from each other.”
Students should learn to question AI
While panelists highlighted AI’s potential to improve legal work in the opening panel, “Training Lawyers When AI Can Research, Reason, and Write,” they repeatedly stressed that law students and lawyers must be able to independently verify and check the technology’s output.
Daniel Schwarcz, a University of Minnesota law professor whose research displayed how lawyers use AI tools, said studies involving upper-level law students show participants who used AI finished tasks faster and produced higher-quality work than those who didn’t. In a short-term test, the benefit lasted after the AI was taken away because it helped them better understand the source material. The danger, he said, is that AI “can crowd out human legal reasoning.” He cautioned that AI is only useful when users understand enough to spot issues and challenge conclusions. “You must be able to assess, adapt, explain and build upon the AI output,” he said.
Seth Chandler, founding director of the new center and the Beirne, Maynard & Parsons LLP Professor of Law, said legal educators can no longer ignore the technology because students and professionals are already using it. Instead, he said law schools and practitioners need to help future lawyers understand both AI’s capabilities and limitations as well as the skills needed in the workforce.
Chandler teaches the “LLMs for Lawyers” course, where second- and third-year students, most with no computer science background, each choose a legal problem and build an AI tool to address it. Students leave the class with something to show employers beyond grades, he said.
Firms may get smaller, but work won’t dry up
The attorneys on the second panel, “From Experiment to Operating Model: Responsible AI in Practice,” said AI will change how firms are staffed but not eliminate the work. Alex Shahrestani, managing partner of Promise Legal, said AI could allow smaller teams to handle more work, adding “I also think that we’re going to continue to have plenty of work, no matter how efficient we get.”
Stephanie Duff-O’Bryan, senior counsel at Cleveland Krist PLLC, offered another angle, saying lawyers may become more like policymakers as AI becomes widely used, thinking more about the reasons behind the rules. “There’s a reason behind the rule,” she said. “We want society to be a certain way. We wanted a certain outcome. That’s why we wrote the rules this way. That’s why we interpret the rules this way.”
Courts want AI, but not for every decision
The program’s final panel, “AI at the Courthouse Door and Inside Chambers,” focused on the impact of AI on the judiciary.
Hilary Reed, a clinical professor at the Law Center, opened the discussion by describing how AI is changing court filings. “Attorneys are able to create more and more work product with AI,” she said. “Pro se individuals representing themselves are able to create … more and longer filings.”
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez of the Western District of Texas addressed whether AI should be used to decide who goes to jail or what sentence someone receives. “I do not believe the state of technology is appropriate for those kinds of decision-making functions,” he said. He noted that no system is perfect, including human judges, and that people expect perfection from AI. “I still think that the ramifications of sentencing decisions and bail decisions are too great for the current state of technology,” he said.
However, he said, the unmet need for legal help is more than lawyers can ever meet, and technology can offer a solution. “We’re going to need automation,” Rodriguez said. In state courts especially, many people “never even get their day in court because they default,” he said. Courts will need different tools for chambers work and for tasks like translation, court reporting and intake, and staff are being asked to do more with less, he added.
Shlomo Klapper, chief executive officer of Learned Hand, warned about hidden instructions for AI. “I do think prompt injections are very, very serious,” he said. His slides described an August 2026 Connecticut case, Elliott v. New York Bariatric Group, in which tiny white text told any AI reviewing a filing to agree with it. The judge found the text and the filer lost electronic filing privileges.
Duff-O’Bryan said she would like to see less AI in the courts than in law offices because that is where the law is made and changed. “That’s where we’re supposed to be deciding as humans, how we want to govern ourselves,” she said.
The Center for AI, Law and the Legal Profession plans to offer additional programming, including a spring 2027 forum, “When the Unrepresented Have AI,” for judges, lawyers and public-interest groups on how people without lawyers use AI. A 2027 Texas policy forum on regulating data centers, “Practical Regulation of Texas Data Centers,” is also planned in collaboration with the Law Center’s Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Center.
More information about the center and its programming is available at law.uh.edu/ai.
