David S. Kemp

I help lawyers and legal organizations learn to incorporate AI better; by “better” I mean improving efficiency, lowering risk, and building durable skills and knowledge. My work draws on nearly a decade of law school teaching and close, day-to-day attention to how AI is reshaping legal practice.

Headshot of David S. Kemp

David’s workshop on AI in legal teaching was more useful and thought-provoking than any other I’ve attended. … My colleagues and I came away with a firm, sound understanding of the current uses and limits of AI, how to incorporate AI into coursework to promote student mastery of course objectives, and pedagogical and ethical considerations in developing course and institutional policies on AI use.

— Laura Hermer, James E. Kelley Professor of Law
Mitchell Hamline School of Law

Tools I’ve Built

Talks & Workshops

A selection of invited keynote addresses, panels, and workshops centered on the intersection of generative AI and the law. These engagements reflect my commitment to distilling the complexities of emerging tech into accessible frameworks for legal scholars, practitioners, and general audiences.

  • Jul. 2026 Justia

    AI and Legal Ethics: Navigating New York’s Evolving Framework

    This New York CLE webinar for Justia moved past the familiar hallucinated-citation cases to the harder questions now facing New York practitioners: what 22 NYCRR Part 161 does and does not require by way of AI disclosure, “second-generation” failure modes such as real cases cited for the wrong proposition, and what “reasonable efforts” under Rule 1.6 mean when a vendor’s retrieval system holds client documents.

  • May 2026 Brooklyn Law School

    Assessments in the AI Age

    The first program in Brooklyn Law School’s faculty Summer AI Series. Using the Integrity by Design framework, this session treated assessment validity as a design problem: whether an assessment’s format still requires the cognitive work it is meant to measure once students have access to AI. Participants classified assessments as AI-resistant, AI-transparent, or AI-embedded, then worked through live redesigns of two faculty assessments. The Assessment Validator above was built as a companion to this session.

  • Mar. 2026 Mitchell Hamline School of Law

    Law School Policies and Assessments in the Age of Generative AI

    This three-session, full-day workshop for Mitchell Hamline School of Law faculty covers AI fundamentals, policies, and assessments. The session on AI fundamentals addresses capabilities and limitations, prompting, and use cases; the policies session included customizable policies for all course types grounded in pedagogical principles; and the assessments session covered the spectrum of AI-resistant, AI-transparent, and AI-integrative assessments for in-person, hybrid, and remote course formats.

  • Mar. 2026 Rutgers AI and Emerging Tech Law Students Association

    AI in Practice: A Panel and Networking Event

    A student-organized panel and networking event at Rutgers Law School on how generative AI is changing day-to-day legal practice and what that means for students about to enter the profession.

  • Feb. 2026 Rutgers Law School

    Generative AI in Clinical Legal Education

    This workshop and CLE session for Rutgers Law School clinical faculty covers the responsible and ethical use, including necessary risks and safeguards for integrating Generative AI into clinical legal education.

  • Feb. 2026 Rutgers Law School

    Law School Leadership in the Age of Generative AI

    In this presentation for Rutgers Law School senior leadership, I make the case for integrating AI literacy as an essential component of legal education curriculum and workflows.

  • May 2025 Medical Humanities Conference, RWJBarnabas Health

    Using AI for Research and Writing, Studying, and Skill Development

    Delivered at the RWJBarnabas Health Medical Humanities Conference, this presentation details the practical applications of Large Language Models for research, writing, studying, and skill development.

  • Apr. 2025 Rutgers Computer & Technology Law Journal

    Bins to Bots: Recycling, Individual Responsibility, and the Environmental Regulation of AI

    Featured speaker at the journal’s symposium, Guardrails for Green Tech: Legal Perspectives on AI’s Environmental Impact. This talk explores the environmental regulation and responsibility of AI by applying key lessons learned from the history of consumer recycling.

  • Apr. 2025 Rutgers Business Law Journal

    Artificial Intelligence in Business Law: A Look Ahead

    Panelist at the Rutgers Business Law Journal symposium on the near-term trajectory of AI in business law practice, including adoption, risk, and the professional responsibility questions that follow.

  • Spring 2025 Rutgers Law School

    Generative AI for Law Faculty

    A four-session series covering: AI for drafting and reviewing hypos; AI assistance with recommendation and clerkship letters; AI for studying; and AI in writing courses and supervising student notes.

  • Dec. 2024 State Bar of Wisconsin

    Generative AI Skills for Lawyers

    Covering ethical considerations, prompt engineering, and the limitations of LLMs, this remote presentation introduced members to fundamental generative AI skills.

  • Dec. 2024 GenAI Convo Group

    Integrating Generative AI in Online Courses

    This presentation (co-presented with Anna Elbroch) sought to inform educators and faculty about some best practices for integrating Generative AI tools into online and other educational courses.

  • Nov. 2024 GenAI Convo Group

    Distance Ed Courses and AI: Friend or Foe?

    Co-presented with Anna Elbroch, this session examined whether generative AI is a threat or an asset in distance-education courses, where students work unsupervised and AI use is hard to observe, and offered course-design responses that treat AI as part of the learning environment rather than something to police.

  • Oct. 2024 Private law firm, Wisconsin

    Applications of AI in Law Practice

    An introductory exploration of general AI models and prompting strategies, designed to highlight high-value use cases alongside the essential ethical guardrails required for legal work.

  • Oct. 2024 Seton Hall Law School

    AI and the Ethical Implications on Legal Practitioners

    As a panelist at the Seton Hall Journal of Legislation & Public Policy symposium Artificial Intelligence for Lawyers and Law Students: Crutch, Craft, or Catalyst, I explained the academic integrity and professional responsibility implications of AI in law schools.

  • Sep. 2024 GenAI Convo Group

    The Changing GenAI Ethics Landscape: More Ethics in the Legal Writing Classroom?

    This brief ethics overview for legal writing professors (co-presented with Kirsten Davis) analyzed the implications of ABA Formal Opinion No. 512 for Generative AI ethics in both legal writing and ethics instruction.

  • Jun. 2024 State Bar of Wisconsin

    Using AI with Benefits and Risks in Mind

    This keynote address (co-presented with Hon. Scott Schlegel) at the State Bar of Wisconsin Annual Meeting & Conference addressed the specific benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence in the practice of law, including hallucinations, deepfakes and authentication of evidence, and ethical duties.

  • Jun. 2024 State Bar of Wisconsin

    Practical Applications of AI in Legal Practice

    In this CLE session at the State Bar of Wisconsin Annual Meeting & Conference, this presentation provided an overview of generative AI utility in legal practice, covering the mechanics of effective prompting, diverse workflow applications, and the critical security warnings inherent to the technology.

  • Jun. 2024 CALI Conference

    Supervised Learning: Why (and How) Law Schools Should Teach and Use Generative AI

    This presentation advocated for the integration of generative AI into law school curricula, exploring how faculty and administrators can master the technology’s mechanics, ethics, and practical applications to effectively adapt teaching and assessment for an AI-augmented legal landscape.

  • Mar. 2024 Rutgers Law School, Faculty Committee on Technology and AI

    Helping Faculty Develop Effective Generative AI Policies

    Presented to the Rutgers Law School Faculty Committee on Technology and AI, this session offered a framework and sample language to help faculty write course-level generative AI policies that are clear to students, consistent across the curriculum, and grounded in learning objectives rather than blanket prohibition.

  • Aug. 2023 Private law firm, New Jersey

    Generative AI and the Practice of Law

    A comprehensive look at the capabilities and limitations of LLMs, featuring a deep dive into prompt design, practical office integration, and the primary ethical risks facing practitioners.

  • Feb. 2023 Justia

    Write Like the Best Legal Writers

    Focused on improving legal writing, this California CLE webinar highlights essential techniques drawn from the distinct writing styles of renowned Supreme Court Justices.

“If a machine can easily do everything we are asking our students to do, then we are not asking enough of our students.”

— David S. Kemp

Articles & Editorials

I contribute to the legal conversation through a mix of formal journal articles and digital editorials. My work often explores the intersection of emerging technologies, equity, and ethics, distilling complex legal frameworks into clear, accessible insights for scholars, industry leaders, and the public alike.

Teaching Legal Research in the Age of AI: A Metacognitive Approach to Preserving Foundational Skills

Legal Writing (forthcoming Mar. 2027)

This essay argues that AI research tools, by delivering a finished analysis in minutes, let first-year students bypass the struggle through which research judgment develops: monitoring what they do not yet know, working through productive difficulty, and regulating their own process. It proposes sequencing conventional research before AI at both the curricular and the assignment level, enforced through a structured research log that records a pre-research plan, the provenance of every source, and how each AI-identified authority could have been found and verified by conventional means. A sample research plan and log is included as an appendix.

Bins to Bots: Recycling, Individual Responsibility, and the Environmental Regulation of AI

51 Rutgers Comput. & Tech. L.J. SE81 (2026)

Drawing on the failures of consumer recycling, this article argues that AI’s environmental impact cannot be solved through individual responsibility or voluntary corporate commitments alone. Instead, it proposes a regulatory framework that aligns market forces with sustainability by using mandatory disclosures, resource-weighted fees, and producer responsibility to reward resource efficiency.

Artificial Intelligence for Lawyers and Law Students: Crutch, Craft, or Catalyst?

49 Seton Hall J. Legis. & Pub. Pol’y 633 (2025)

This article explores the integration of generative AI into legal education, examining its history and the potential for faculty to utilize it for pedagogical, administrative, and scholarly purposes. It further addresses the risks of student over-reliance on AI, proposing that law schools should treat AI as a collaborative tool and shift toward assessments that prioritize process and diverse lawyering skills over traditional exams.

ChatGPT is Notoriously Bad at Legal Research. So Let’s Use it to Teach Legal Research

Verdict (Sep. 2023)

The article argues that ChatGPT’s well-known failures in legal research — such as hallucinating cases and misrepresenting the law — can be turned into a pedagogical advantage, by having law students use AI-generated output as a starting point for learning how to verify legal information using reliable tools like Westlaw and LexisNexis.

Abandoning Precedent: The Case for Bringing ChatGPT into Law Schools

Verdict (Aug. 2023)

The article argues for the integration—rather than prohibition—of generative AI tools, specifically ChatGPT, into legal education. It suggests that guided AI instruction on how to harness this disruptive technology prepares law students for the evolving landscape of legal practice.

Should We Rely on AI to Help Avoid Bias in Patient Selection for Major Surgery?

24 AMA J. Ethics E773 (2022) (with Charles E. Binkley and Brandi Braud Scully)

Written with surgeon and bioethicist Charles E. Binkley and Brandi Braud Scully, this article examines whether machine-learning clinical decision support can counter surgeons’ tendency to overestimate operative risk for patients based on race and socioeconomic status, and warns that a model trained on historically biased outcomes data will reproduce the bias it was meant to remove.

Recent Writing

Shorter and more frequent pieces on AI, law, and legal education appear on my blog, Learning Machines. The latest posts:

Read the blog

Background

I spent nearly a decade teaching in law schools — at Rutgers Law School, UC Berkeley School of Law, and UC Law San Francisco — where I built curricula, assessment frameworks, and training programs around one of legal education’s most pressing questions: how to prepare lawyers for a profession being reshaped by artificial intelligence. That work included six semesters of a course I designed, first called Emerging Tools & Technology in the Practice of Law and most recently AI Skills for Lawyers, centered on building the kind of transferable judgment and problem-solving skills that hold up as tools and circumstances change.

I now bring that same approach — grounded in learning science, professional responsibility, and close tracking of a field that shifts weekly — to the practice side, working on AI innovation within a global law firm. The transition from teaching to practice sharpened a conviction I’ve held throughout: the people building and deploying these tools need the same rigor around pedagogy, ethics, and institutional design that the best law schools demand.

Alongside that work, I have served since 2011 as managing editor of Oyez and Justia’s Verdict, and since 2025 as Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI).

My approach to training and curriculum development draws on how memory works, how skills transfer, and how judgment develops under pressure. That foundation shapes everything from how I sequence a training program to how I design individual exercises.

I remain actively engaged with legal education and welcome conversations with law school administrations, faculties, and legal organizations about AI pedagogy, curriculum design, and the institutional questions law schools are working through right now.

Education

UC Berkeley, School of Law

Juris Doctor

Rice University

Bachelor of Arts, Psychology

Curriculum Vitae

A complete record of my academic appointments, publications, presentations, and professional experience.

Download CV