Welcome to AI for Legal Professionals

AI is the biggest productivity shift in legal practice since the search engine. Lawyers using AI well save hours per week on document review, e-discovery, drafting, and research. Lawyers using AI badly get sanctioned for citing hallucinated cases. The gap between those two outcomes is not the technology. It's knowing how to use it. The ABA has issued guidance. State bars are setting requirements. Courts are starting to define what counts as proper AI use in litigation. The rules are still forming, but the core obligations (competence, confidentiality, supervision, candor) haven't changed: they apply to AI use the same way they applied to faxing documents in 1985. This course is a practical guide for lawyers, paralegals, and legal ops professionals. It covers what AI can actually do in legal work today, how to use it safely, and what's coming. We'll cover: • AI for law firms: the basics • Practical guide: what can AI do in legal work? • AI for legal research (tools, what to verify, what to trust) • Document review and e-discovery: where AI saves the most time • AI discovery in practice (real workflows from leading firms) • Contract drafting with AI (the ABA's perspective) • Contract review: safer, better, faster (ABA best practices) • Ethics: ABA Opinion 512 and state requirements • Confidentiality: vendor due diligence, data residency, what to do • How courts view AI evidence (the law is still forming here) This course assumes some legal background but no technical expertise. Time: ~3 hours across 10 articles.