In the Phaedrus , Plato tells us that Socrates distrusted the written word. He believed that committing knowledge to writing would weaken memory and discourage dialogue. Writing, he warned, is inferior to debate because it cannot respond. It only creates an appearance of wisdom, not genuine wisdom.

The parallel with AI is clear. We now have systems that write, summarize, argue, program, and draw at a speed and with a breadth of knowledge that no human being can match. They make us feel competent and informed without us having to first confront the discomfort inherent in any learning process. The danger is not that AI will think, but that we will stop thinking for ourselves.

Writing and oral debate

However, the history of writing offers a less pessimistic alternative. As writing became established as a central element of education, oral debate was not abandoned. What was essential in debate was preserved, to the point that we still use the Socratic method in teaching today, and especially in law schools, because we know that questions posed in the classroom teach students to think quickly and develop judgment in a way that no text can replace.

At the same time, we learned new ways of thinking. Silent reading, once unusual, became second nature. We learned to reason internally and to engage in a dialogue with the written text, which has allowed us to continue conversing with Socrates even today.

In other words, we don’t choose between debate and text. We broaden our ways of thinking and, in doing so, become better thinkers.

AI Literacy

We are now facing a similar threshold with artificial intelligence. Just as literacy became a fundamental requirement for participating in society, AI literacy is becoming essential for informed participation in law, public life, and democratic decision-making.

A law graduate who enters the legal profession without the ability to understand and critically engage with AI, to question its assumptions, and to consciously address its ethical limitations will be as ill-prepared as a lawyer who cannot read. A legal education that excludes AI is, therefore, an incomplete education.

If legal education doesn’t adapt, we risk losing a generation of students trained with pre-AI methods for a post-AI world. Their ways of thinking, learning, and writing will have been shaped by these tools long before they reach our classrooms, and the professions they enter will demand that they use them critically and responsibly.

Ignoring AI won’t make our students think better. And it can lead to demotivation and frustration, while leaving them inadequately prepared.

Social consequences

It’s not just about our students’ careers, however important that may be. The consequences of our inaction don’t fall solely on our graduates. The law influences our daily lives, often silently but omnipresently, and when technology transforms how society functions, the law must transform with it.

It will be our students, as future lawyers, judges, policymakers, or law professors, who must translate these changes into fair regulations. If we don’t prepare them for this, the gap will manifest itself in every other area.

Strike a balance

So what should legal education do? It’s not enough to simply add a subject or adopt a single rule. Certainly, it’s pointless to turn a blind eye and prohibit the use of AI. The challenge is more profound. We need to strengthen the foundations while simultaneously evolving with new developments. It’s not about choosing between tradition and innovation, but about finding a balance between the two.

We must redouble our efforts to cultivate what makes us human: intellectual curiosity, purpose, creativity , the drive to question, and critical thinking . These dimensions become even more important when AI performs a substantial portion of the technical work.

Transformation of the questions

When nearly everyone has access to systems capable of writing reports, summarizing cases, or outlining legal arguments, the key questions change. What will students choose to do with that capability? What questions will they ask? What issues will matter enough to them to go beyond a merely acceptable answer?

AI cannot decide these matters. It cannot, and should not, determine students’ motivations or priorities. The ability to decide what we want, to define our purpose, and to pursue our goals remains central to our capacity for action as human beings.

Five major changes

However, we must evolve. Integrating AI as a resource that fosters the intellectual development of our students, rather than weakening it, requires us to:

1. Educating ourselves. Professors and academic leaders need to understand AI both functionally and conceptually: what these tools are, how they work, what challenges they pose, and how they can be used both to teach law and to improve its practice. You can’t teach what you don’t understand.
2. AI literacy for students. This literacy should be universal, rigorous, and structured. It enables students to understand how law, technology, and society interact; how AI systems reason and why they fail; how they influence reasoning and judgment; and what their responsible use entails in practice, both in everyday life and in professional settings. Students should not rely on readily available answers they don’t know how to evaluate.
3. Creating spaces for simulation, reflection, and metacognition—environments where students can openly work with AI to simulate current legal practice—will allow them to experiment with tools, analyze results, identify errors, and reflect on their own thinking as part of the learning process. Achieving this requires resources, dedicated coursework, and structured practice.
4. Decide in which areas AI should not be used. Design tasks that prevent AI from handling key cognitive processes and continue to utilize memory and attention, in-depth reading, reasoning, critical thinking, and ethical frameworks. Ensure that students have basic legal skills and can perform these tasks without AI assistance: detecting problems, applying precedents, identifying and mitigating risks, or defending a legal position.
5. Transforming our teaching methodologies to raise the intellectual level we demand of our students requires changing assignments, exams, and classroom dynamics. If AI is capable of performing specific tasks, these can no longer be the ultimate goal of learning. Developing skills in the interpretive, strategic, and ethical aspects of legal reasoning should be the objective of the methodology, not added later as a belated resource.

Preparing for the world to come

The legal profession is changing, and we have an obligation to our students: to prepare them for the world they will soon have to face, not for the world in which we were trained.

The written word did not diminish our capabilities; it transformed them. Human beings adapt. That is our genius. And, once again, the time has come to put it into practice.

Author Bio: Carmen Pérez-Llorca Zamora is the Vice Dean of IE Law School at IE University