Case Western Reserve Law School Requires AI Certification for First-Year Students
Case Western Reserve University School of Law became the first law school in the nation last year to require all first-year students to complete a certification program in legal artificial intelligence. The program, developed with Wickard.ai, gives students practical exposure to AI fundamentals, ethical obligations, regulatory issues, and legal technology tools.
The school introduced a new competition this year centered on "vibe coding"-a method of using AI to write functional software based on intuition rather than formal planning. Students identified real problems attorneys face and built working prototypes.
Winning Projects Address Day-to-Day Practice Problems
First-year student Jamie Werner won the competition with a platform that tracks local court rules, judges' standing orders, and judicial background information including recent opinions and biographies. Werner said his legal writing professor, former Assistant United States Attorney Stacey Bergstrom, emphasized how standing orders can make or break a case.
"The competition provided a useful opportunity to explore how far generative AI models have advanced in a relatively short period of time," Werner said. "I wouldn't have imagined it would be this simple to build an advanced app even a year or two ago."
Other submissions included timekeeping and billing automation tools, citation-checking systems, AI-assisted jury selection tools, and judge analytics platforms. Sophie Kwiatkowski earned an honorable mention for a tool tracking local court rules and opinions on AI usage in legal practice.
Students Without Coding Experience Build Working Tools
Kwiatkowski said she had never written a line of code before the course. "As a literature major in undergrad, I always saw coding as something abstract and wholly unnecessary for me to even explore," she said. "After vibe coding in this course, coding is a lot less intimidating."
Werner noted that the exercise also exposed limitations. "Encountering issues with the model ignoring instructions or hallucinating information was a reminder that significant limitations remain," he said.
Oliver Roberts, the adjunct professor leading the program, said the student projects demonstrated practical judgment and real-world relevance. Kwiatkowski added that the training's balanced approach-optimistic about AI's potential while accounting for its limitations-prepares law students to shape the legal field's relationship with the technology.
For more on AI for Legal professionals, or explore how Generative Code is being applied in practice.
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