Natural Language Lawyering

Catalog description

Elective Course Fulfills Law and Computing Concentration elective Natural language processing (NLP) is the specific branch of artificial intelligence responsible for understanding and generating language. As the legal profession is based almost entirely on written language, the impact that NLP has on the legal profession is momentous. The lawyer of the future needs to be able to understand NLP to eQectively engage and maintain his or her practice. This course is designed with a dualistic purpose. The first, is to give law students with the technical background gained from Coding for Lawyers or Statistics and Machine Learning for Lawyers, a chance to develop their skills in natural language processing and develop/understand methods that drive Large Language Models, Generative Large Language Models, E-Discovery, Due Diligence Analysis, Automatic Contract Drafting, AI Based Patent Search, etc. The second is to give students without a technical background a safe and welcoming environment to understand NLP, what it is, how it works, and how it impacts lawyers and judges. Therefore, this course will be structured as a two credit/three credit course. Students who are curious about learning about NLP will take the course as a two-credit course designed to get them familiar with the terminology, high level understanding of the standard methods in NLP, and how to engage and understand NLP in their careers, and how to evaluate NLP methods from an ethical point of view. Those students who have the technical background will be able to take the course as a three-credit course, in addition to the two credit course requirements, will be given the opportunity to explore their technical skills through rigorous programming assignments.