Class Information
Fall 2026
6381 Large Language Models for Lawyers - CHANDLER- 19339
Professor(s):
Seth Chandler (FACULTY)
Credits: 3
Course Areas: Law And Society/ Interdisciplinary
Intellectual Property and Information Law
Time: 10:30a-12:00p MW Location:
Course Outline: Artificial intelligence is transforming legal practice faster than any technology since the internet, and lawyers who understand it will define the profession's future. This course teaches you to work fluently with tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude — not as novelties, but as professional instruments for research, writing, analysis, and client service.
You'll learn prompt engineering, multimodal AI, retrieval augmented generation, and how to evaluate commercial legal AI products critically. For 2026, the course places special emphasis on AI agents — autonomous systems that can execute multi-step legal workflows — which have matured dramatically and now represent the field's most consequential frontier. You'll build with platforms like Claude Cowork, Midpage, and Protégé to see what agents can actually do in practice.
The heart of the course is your project. Every student designs and builds a working legal technology application, with close guidance from Professor Chandler at every stage — from initial concept through final presentation. Past students have built Supreme Court outcome predictors, automated voir dire assistants, construction law hallucination checkers, and immigration document drafters. Your project will be yours to keep and develop after the course ends.
No programming background is required or expected. English is the new programming language, and the course is designed so that non-coders compete on equal footing. If you can describe what you want clearly, you can build it.
The AI landscape shifts weekly. The syllabus adapts accordingly, ensuring you graduate with skills that are current, not already obsolete.
Course Syllabus:
Course Notes: (Face-to-Face) The UH registration system instruction mode for this course is listed in parenthesis. For this instruction mode, instructors and students are expected to normally be physically present in the classroom. If the course has a final examination, it will be in a classroom requiring your physical presence. Other assessment, such as a mid-term exam, may also be in a classroom. Whether this instructor will offer “remote presence” (starting a zoom meeting from the podium computer to enable student remote access on an occasional basis) for part or all of the semester is not known, but students should not rely on an expectation that remote presence will be available.
Quota=20.
Prerequisites:
First Day Assignments:
Final Exam Schedule:
This course will have:
Exam:
Paper:
Satisfies Senior Upper Level Writing Requirement: No
Experiential Course Type: No
Bar Course: No
DistanceEd ABA: No
Pass-Fail Student Election: Unavailable (Instructor Preference)
