When generative AI tools began reshaping legal practice in 2023, Professor Alison Julien approached them with her characteristic curiosity. “I’m not usually an early adopter,” she says, “but as a legal writing professor, I needed to understand what these tools could and could not do.”
Her exploration has grown into a thoughtful reimagining of how students learn to read, write, and reason like lawyers.
Now, Professor Julien is helping Marquette law students navigate the exciting and complex rise of artificial intelligence in legal writing—and supporting her faculty colleagues as they learn, too, in the true Jesuit spirit of lifelong education.
She distinguishes between two kinds of rigor. Logistical rigor—the cite-checking, formatting, and time-consuming tasks students know well—and intellectual rigor, which demands close reading, careful rule synthesis, strong judgment, and purposeful revision.
Her hope? That AI can help reduce the former so students can spend more time exercising the latter.
In her classroom, AI becomes a thought partner—not an answer machine. Students might revise an AI-generated rule paragraph, prompt an AI tool to generate text that meets particular parameters, or compare their own analysis to a tool’s output. The result is a clearer understanding of how lawyers think, verify information, and communicate with precision.
“What hasn’t changed,” she notes, “is that lawyers remain responsible for the accuracy of the law, the quality of the analysis, and the ethical use of client information.” For Professor Julien, the goal is simple: graduates who can use AI thoughtfully, critically, and professionally.
“In the end,” she says, “the only way to understand these tools is to use them. And the only way to prepare students is to help them use AI without outsourcing their judgment,” which is why she had added a new course to her teaching portfolio - Advanced Legal Writing: AI.
Professor Julien joined the faculty in 2001 after practicing special education law and civil litigation and clerking for the Honorable Justin M. Johnson of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania. A longtime leader in the national legal writing community, she has served on the Board of Directors of the Legal Writing Institute and taught generations of Marquette law students in Legal Analysis, Writing & Research 1 and 2 and other courses focusing on legal writing.