Kentucky

How a Law Professor is Making Her Case: Using AI to Personalize How Students Learn the Law

An interview with Dr. Susan Tanner, a law professor at the University of Louisville, Louis D. Brandeis School of Law.

Four images of Susan Tanner engaging in day-to-day operations
3 min read

I originally became interested in AI because my PhD was in rhetoric from a computer science and tech-focused school which meant I was very involved in corpus and computational linguistics and natural language processing—essentially evaluating patterns of language. So when generative AI started making headlines a few years ago, I immediately began playing around with it.

One of the things that’s become increasingly apparent is that lawyers can’t ignore AI. At some point, not using it will be a disservice to our clients because ultimately, it can help us do our jobs better and faster. I’ve started incorporating it into my class for that reason—using AI to support my teaching as well as showing my students how to use it in their own work. I’m always thinking about sharing information in a way that’s more accessible and interactive.

My favorite tool is Google’s NotebookLM, which is a great foundational resource because it uses grounded sources and you don’t have to leave the platform to ask follow-up questions—something I’m encouraging my students to do to deepen their understanding. I’m a huge fan of the Audio Overview feature, which basically creates a podcast of the content you provide.

There’s so much information my students have to learn, so one thing I love to do is take a handout I’ve created and pop it into Google’s NotebookLM to create an Audio Overview. Anyone who's working with students right now knows that it's harder and harder to get students to put in the time outside of class, so anything I can do to reinforce that learning is great.

Dr. Susan Tanner, law professor at the University of Louisville

I just finished writing an open-source textbook, which I’ll be putting into NotebookLM at some point, too, to create a series of podcasts for each of the chapters.

I often encourage collaborative exploration by doing a show-and-tell of my processes to try to get students to incorporate some of these resources for themselves. For example, when we’re doing legal research, we almost always find too much. So, I show students how to collect and collate the research to make it less overwhelming by inputting a case into Gemini and asking for a summary.

Just recently in my own work, I was researching deep fakes and used Gemini to get started. In the law, you have to check and double-check everything. It was so helpful seeing Gemini’s research trails because I could easily click on the source links to see if it was summarizing everything correctly.

Personalizing teaching with AI has been hugely helpful, allowing for what I call “bespoke pedagogy.” For years, creating tailored handouts for students with specific needs was incredibly time-intensive. Now, I can leverage my expertise to identify an issue and use Gemini Canvas, a feature on Gemini that’s particularly useful for iterating and organizing ideas, to generate customized resources like handouts or activities as needs arise.

Dr. Susan Tanner, law professor at the University of Louisville

While examples are excellent for learning, they can be hard to create or find. Now, with Gemini Canvas, I can create this targeted support, adapting to students’ diverse and evolving needs more effectively than ever before.

This ability to provide students with what they need, when they need it, not only shows them how much I value their individual learning journeys; the learning gains are huge. The AI tools available to us, our students, and practitioners have monumentally shifted our expectations of what's possible in legal education and practice.