📖 Today’s lesson
Lesson 1: What is AI — and what is a prompt?
A large language model is a pattern-recognition engine: a first-year associate with perfect recall of every published case and zero legal judgment. A prompt is your assignment memo — and the most powerful line in it is assigning a role.
Why this matters: Ask a bare question and the model answers like a blog post. Assign it the role of senior counsel and it answers from the legal literature — terms of art, structure, caveats. One line, completely different work product. With 79% of legal professionals now using AI, the differentiator is no longer access; it is instruction quality.