Noah Smith

Law school research used to take me 4 hours. Now it takes 1.

I want to be careful here because I know some people in legal circles are very sceptical of AI — and for good reason when it comes to citing cases. But there's a part of the research process where AI is brilliant and doesn't have those risks: understanding the legal landscape before you go into the databases. When I'm starting a research task, I now begin with Perplexity to get an overview. What are the key legal principles in this area? What are the main cases I should look for? What's the general direction the law has been moving? This gives me a map. Then I go into the proper legal databases (Austlii, Westlaw) to find and verify the actual cases and legislation. Before AI, I'd spend hours in databases half-blind, not knowing what I was looking for. Now I go in knowing what I need and find it much faster. The key is: never cite a case an AI tells you about without verifying it in a primary source. AI hallucinates cases. But using it to understand the territory before you search? That's been a genuine breakthrough for me.