Don’t ditch those textbooks just yet
The rise of AI will not make core law modules redundant and aspiring lawyers from the “TikTok generation” will still need to master the fundamentals, according to one of the country’s more senior judges.
Speaking at the Association of Law Teachers’ conference at Exeter Uni yesterday, Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, insisted that law students must continue to study the core modules even as AI tools increasingly take over routine legal research.
“Legal training will need to be different, but law students will still need to understand the basic parameters of contract, tort, criminal, family law, company law, administrative and property law,” Vos told law teachers.
The reason, he argued, is not tradition for its own sake. It is precisely these foundational skills that will allow the next generation of lawyers to do what machines cannot: explain, challenge and contextualise AI-generated legal outputs to clients who increasingly arrive at law firms having already consulted ChatGPT, Claude or specialist tools like Harvey.
Vos was candid about the scale of the challenge facing legal educators. He acknowledged it “will be hard to train lawyers in analytical skills when AI will be doing a lot of the underlying legal research and legal groundwork,” but insisted that solutions would be found.
Central to his argument was a frank assessment of what he termed the “TikTok generation” — younger people whose values, expectations and understanding of justice have been shaped by a lifetime of instant, machine-delivered information. He warned that assuming they understand justice the same way as older generations would be “a fundamental misunderstanding.”
It is that same generation, he argued, who will form both the clients and the lawyers of the future, making it all the more important that legal education equips students to bridge the gap between what machines produce and what humans can actually understand and accept.
Beyond core modules, Vos called for a sweeping rethink of legal education more broadly. Ethics, he said, must be “taught through a new lens.” Data protection and cyber security should become mandatory rather than optional. And lawyers must be trained to spot AI-generated fakes and to defend genuine materials against false claims that they are fabricated.
